This afternoon I'd like to comment on a very important line in Chapter 26. Actually it's
in the section The Immediacy of Salvation. "Future loss is not your fear. But present
joining is your dread." "Future loss is not your fear. But present joining is your dread."
This goes hand-in-hand with another very important line in Chapter 13, The Fear of Redemption,
where Jesus says that your fear is not of crucifixion. "Your real terror is of redemption."
In other words, we are not afraid of the ego's thought system. We are not afraid of what
it tells us that we'll be punished in the future for our sins of the past. We are not
afraid that the ego tells us that our sins and guilt demand punishment, which again would
always be forthcoming in the future. But whether the future is in the next minute or the next
year or the next decade or when I die, the future is not what we dread. We are not afraid
of punishment. Indeed unconsciously because usually consciously we don't experience it
this way, but unconsciously we welcome the punishment. We welcome our fears. We welcome
our sinful, guilty past which sets up a fearful future and we do all this because this establishes
the reality, at least in our tortured, delusional minds, that the ego is alive and well. Its
thought system of separation, of sin, guilt, and fear, culminating in punishment and ultimately
the punishment of our death, all this is corroborated and confirmed and strengthened by our belief,
on a personal level, that we are bad people or there are bad people around us, that if
terrible things happen to us that on the one hand, it's not our fault because all the sinners
outside of us caused it. But our secret dream is that we have this coming to us. Our real
fear is that our decision-making mind will at one point wake up, recognize its mistake
in choosing the wrong teacher, and will instead choose the Holy Spirit or Jesus as its teacher,
accept the Atonement that says the separation never happened, and then we would awaken from
this dream of death to reality as children of love. That's our fear. It's the ultimate
reality of our being "a Oneness joined as One" as the text says, of our being so much
a part of God that there's no place where He ends and we begin "as something separate
from Him." That we are part of that undifferentiated unity that the mystics speak of. That when
we speak of reality as being a non-dual reality, we are saying there is God and there is nothing
else. God is the First in the Holy Trinity and there is no second and no third. In this
world, reflection of this perfect Oneness is our shared interests, the fact that we
are all the same. We all have the same split-minded ego, the same split-minded Holy Spirit, and
the same power of the decision maker to choose between them. We are therefore all the same
and all differences that seem to be so striking, if not dramatic, are all based on form and
are all basically...in fact, not basically...totally irrelevant to the fact that our minds are
all the same. It is this joining which really means letting go of the belief that we are
separated because when the Course talks about joining with our brothers or joining with
each other, Jesus does not really mean joining. What he really means is accepting the fact
that we are already joined because minds are joined, we're told. Bodies are not. Minds
are joined, and we're joined because we all came from the one split mind that fragmented
into billions and billions of pieces. And all this belief, this insane dream is a defense
against the reality that we are all one, that we are all one in God, one in Christ, that
we are indeed this "Oneness joined as One." So our fear is not of the future because,
again, our fearful future is based upon our sinful past and linear time is nothing more
or less than a projection of the ego's unholy trinity in the mind of sin, guilt, and fear.
So there is a part of us that wants to prove always that the ego is right and Jesus and
his Course are wrong. And behind Jesus, of course, stands God and His reality of perfect
Oneness and perfect Love. So as long as we could prove that we are separated, that we
are sinful, that we "are the home of evil, darkness and sin" as Lesson 93 says, as long
as we could prove that and then make other people responsible for it, our egos are home
free which means our individual identity is preserved forever. So our fear is that all
this is made up, and if this thought system is made up, it means I am made up. And so
it's to preserve my special, unique, individual identity that I, as well as everyone else,
subscribe to this horrific ego thought system that unconsciously, in the perverseness of
our insanity, we welcome. We cherish. We covet and we will kill for rather than to let it
go. And all this is quietly undone when we recognize that the person we thought was different
from us is the same. That's the idea, once again, that we all share the same purpose,
the same need, the same fervent desire to awaken from this dream, knowing that we all
return home "together, or not at all." So it is no longer the present joining that is
our dread. It is the present joining that is our greatest joy because that's true forgiveness
and through choosing the miracle that we return home and finally awaken from this nightmarish
dream of sin, guilt, and fear.