The purpose is to awaken from the dream, and the dream of bodies is just a shadow of the
dream of guilt that's in the mind. We have to be motivated. If Jesus is our teacher,
then he shares the challenge that any teacher has which is to motivate his or her pupils.
They have to want to learn the courses that they are teaching. The only way Jesus will
get us to really learn this course is to realize how unhappy we are where we are. If we believe
everything is wonderful, we study the Course for six months and we get the idea so we think,
we go off happily riding into the sunset, we will not be motivated to really study this,
study it as a text and practice it day-in and day-out—first with the workbook and then
after the year to just practice it for the rest of our lives, all our unforgivenesses
day-in and day-out. We have to be motivated by realizing our life does not work. So that's
why there are all these passages here.
"The descent into hell follows step by step in an inevitable course, once the decision
that guilt is real has been made" (P-2.IV.3:1).
This is what he talks about in the Course as the mad course into insanity. This is what
he also refers to as the ladder that separation led us down. If you look on your chart, you
begin at the top with God that you believe you have left. Then you have a decision-making
part of your mind that makes the wrong choice, seeks to obliterate the Holy Spirit, so now
our self is no longer a capital "S" Self, is no longer even a decision-making self.
It's now as an ego self, little and tiny, pretending in its grandiosity to be something
important. And from that, we descend finally into the level of the world. That's what he's
talking about, and this is inevitable once you make guilt real because guilt demands
punishment. We'll be afraid of the punishment and this demands that we leave the mind to
flee from God's wrath and make up a world. This is not something that happened once in
time. This happens over and over again, each and every instant, as the Course says. There's
that wonderful section, "The Little Hindrance," in Chapter 26 of the text that says every
day and every hour and every minute that each hour holds you but re-live the time when terror
took the place of love. We re-enact that moment when we told the Holy Spirit to get lost and
we listened to the ego instead, and we do this over and over again outside of time,
but we experience its effects within time. But the problem is outside of time which
means the healing has to be outside of time. That's what the holy instant is. It's that
instant outside of time and space when we choose the Holy Spirit instead of the ego.
" Sickness and death and misery now stalk the earth in unrelenting waves, sometimes
together and sometimes in grim succession" (P-2.IV.3:2).
This is Jesus' portrayal of the world. It's not the only place in the material where he
does this, and he's trying to help us realize this is not a nice place. As he says in the
workbook, it's a desert "where starved and thirsty creatures come to die." And that's
not the only place he uses the image of a desert either. There is no life in a desert. There
is no life here, and he tells us there is no life outside of Heaven. So the point of
all this is not to badger us and not to make us feel guilty, but to have us become motivated
that we really want to leave this desert and we don't want to stay in a place where again
"where starved and thirsty creatures come to die." So that's the bad news in terms of
the world that we think is so real and so wonderful, and the good news is:
Yet all these things, however real they seem, are but illusions (P-2.IV.3:3).
Now the problem with that statement, and with so many other statements, is if I accept what
he is saying here that all these things, sickness, death, and misery, are illusions, I must also
accept the fact that this body is an illusion too. That's the problem. Once again, that's
why no one really likes this course. Jesus ultimately is not just saying give up your
grievances, give up all your unforgiveness, give up all your petty hates, give up all
your specialness. It's true he's saying all that but he's saying all that as the stepping-stones
towards eventually giving up this entire self. His purpose is not to have us live more happily
in the dream in which all sickness is eradicated, and death is eradicated, and people live on
and on and on, and everybody is happy. If you think this world works or can work, or
the Course came into this world to make the world a better place and to bring peace and
prosperity and happiness into the world, you will never be motivated to learn it. The purpose
of this course is to help you leave the world voluntarily. Just as the ego had to convince
us right at the beginning to leave the mind and it did this by telling us—it lied—but
it told us and we believed it—that the mind was a very dangerous place. So it gave us
a motivation by making up this very tall tale of sin, guilt, and fear. It gave us the motivation
to leave the mind by our believing if we stayed in the mind we would be most unhappy because
this raging, maniacal, insane God would wreak vengeance on us and destroy us. So the ego
was a very good teacher, insane, but a very good teacher. It knew it had to motivate us,
so it motivated us to leave the mind and make up a world by teaching us the mind would make
us very unhappy. Well, Jesus does the very same thing except his lesson is sane. He now
has to motivate us to undo the ego's motivation. He has to teach us staying in the body, in
the world, will kill us and make us very, very unhappy, and returning to the mind will
bring us real joy. The problem is we still believe the ego so we're still motivated to
flee our mind and live in the world. And the ego says, okay, we're here, now let's make
it a better place. This course does not have as its purpose to make the world a better
place. Unlike the Bible, it does not seek to make a new Jerusalem here on earth. It
does not seek to blend together Heaven and earth and bring Heaven on earth. You can't
integrate two mutually-exclusive realms, Heaven and earth. So Jesus has to motivate us to
look again at this world and the body. That's why you have all these passages in all the
material: text, workbook, manual, the two pamphlets, Helen's poems. It's in all the
stuff. But we are so tempted to set that aside and say, well, he really doesn't mean it that
way. He just means the way we perceive the world is wrong. Wrong, he doesn't mean that.
The world is wrong because it was made to be a defense against what is right which is
the Atonement principle in our minds. You must understand that, otherwise your work
with this course will be very severely limited. You could put a very tight band around it
so it would only say what you want it to say which is how I could live better in this world
and in this body. I want to feel better in this body. Jesus is telling you you can't
feel better in a body. There is no body. But let me help you feel better in the mind by
teaching you that the ego lied to you. The mind is not a dangerous place. There is no
wrathful venomous God hell-bent on destroying you. There is no sinful, guilty, vicious,
evil person named you in your mind. The whole thing is made up. The mind is the only thing
that could save you because it was the mind was the only thing that damned you. So but
Jesus has to motivate us. He has to get us to want to learn his course. So that's why
passages like this are here so that we won't be tempted to try to drag him into the world
and make the world a better place again. Okay, yes. Come on.
Q: I'm just thinking...how about lightening up about the failure of the body, not making
a big deal out of it? [laughter]
I'm sorry. I'm just reading what's in the book, that's all. I'm innocent. One of the
reasons I think it is important, to be a little serious, why it is important to talk about
the body that way is because most people don't like to talk about it that way. And I think
one of the reasons that, in a sense, Jesus takes the gloves off in this course and calls
it as it is is because there is such a strong tendency in the world not to understand the
ego. And he really wants us to understand it because otherwise you won't be able to
make a meaningful choice against it. Now the body in the end is nothing. I mean that's
the lightening of it, that the body is really nothing. But we've made it into something
awful because we first made ourselves to be something awful and we can't understand that
the awfulness that we made is nothing until we first look at the awfulness. The Course
says that you must look at the hate. He says that a number of places, you must look at
the hate. Before you could look at the love, you must look at the hate, not because the
hate is real but because you've made it real, and then made the hate so hateful and fearful
that you don't want to look at it and the world then becomes a cover. So it does get
better at the end, that's the important thing.