as being the Voice for God, the voice within our dream,

the voice within the split mind that reminds us

of our connection with our Source.

Other places He’s referred to as the Call for God.

He’s the call within our split minds to come back.

To go back to that choice point in our minds when we chose the ego,

and now make the correct choice and choose the Holy Spirit.

So it’s that ongoing call that is outside of the dream.

Now that call is going on all the time.

It was going on right from the original instant

when the “tiny, mad idea,” seemed to arise.

But that voice has never been silenced.

The fact that we don’t hear it doesn’t mean it’s not there.

That voice is always there.

Now, when someone like Jesus appeared in the world 2000 years ago,

and he’s not the only one, obviously, but we’ll just stay with Jesus,

he also represented in form a call that came from outside of the dream.

Two thousand years after that when we have A Course in Miracles,

also coming from him, even though it comes within an ego framework,

as the Course itself says, even though it comes in words and concepts,

obviously its message, its content, the love that is the true Source of the Course,

is outside of the dream. It has nothing to do with the wrong-minded box,

it certainly has nothing to do with the world.

It comes from the right-minded box.

Again, that’s the equivalent of Freud’s external stimulus.

And then of course there’s the key message of the Course,

which is forgiveness or healing.

These also are right-minded concepts whose purpose is to reflect

the other thought system that we had rejected, but which is still present.

And that thought system is that call from outside of the dream

whose call, to quote a line earlier in the text about the Holy Spirit,

“It's the call to awaken and be glad.”

The problem, obviously, is that we don’t want to hear the call,

We don’t want to be awakened from this sleep for the very reason

that we chose against the call right from the beginning.

When we were confronted as one Son with the choice between

hearing the voice of the ego, that glorified the separation,

or the voice of the Holy Spirit that said, “What separation? Nothing happened,

we all chose as one son to hear the voice of the ego and to identify with that voice

because we like the idea of being separate,

which then means we like the idea of being asleep.

Because to choose the Holy Spirit is to choose

to hear “the call to awaken” from the dream, from the sleep of separation,

“and be glad,” be glad that it was all a dream and nothing happened.

So we then have a very serious problem.

Here we are nicely sleeping, having these wonderful dreams of pain,

and suffering, and death, and all the glories of specialness,

when for a brief instant it seems to work

only to be overcome by all the times it doesn’t work,

all of a sudden there is this Voice, there is this stimulus

that comes from outside of the dream, and we don’t want to awaken.

Just as Freud described the purpose of the dream is to keep us asleep,

it’s the guardian of our sleep, and when there’s an external stimulus

then the dream attempts to weave the stimulus into the dream

so we don’t awaken, we don’t awaken to the call.

Here is this presence, this message, this all loving content

that comes from outside of the dream.

It comes from only the right mind, there’s no ego in this.

There’s ego in form, just as Jesus appeared as a body,

but the content is beyond the dream.

And remember that content is non-dualistic,

it’s a reflection of the Oneness of Heaven.

Nothing could be more terrifying to the ego, for all the reasons that we’ve seen.

And so likewise the ego will attempt to bring this non-dualistic message

of the Atonement that says the separation never happened,

it will bring that message into the dream so we don’t

awaken from the dream and answer the call.

We bring the telephone into the dream.

So now we’re then very tempted, as many students of the Course have been tempted,

almost from the beginning, from the first day it was published,

is to bring Jesus and the Holy Spirit, or God Himself, into the dream

So rather than their purpose being to awaken us from the dream

by pointing out from the right mind that there’s another choice we can make,

Jesus and the Holy Spirit are brought into the dream,

into the world of bodies, into the world of illusory problems,

where they’re then asked to solve the illusory problems.

So rather than being the instruments of having us awaken from the dream,

they then turn into instruments of making the dream real

by helping us make it better.

It’s very difficult to avoid this temptation.

But it’s very, very important to realize how this is a direct sabotage

of any help this Course can be in your spiritual work.

The only help this Course can be is helping you reach above the battleground

to look with Jesus at the secret dream, at the world’s dream,

and realize that neither of these dreams really works,

both of them are insane, and that you’d be much, much better off

looking at everything in a different way,

realizing that nothing in this world will satisfy you

and that the only thing which will satisfy you

is to make another choice in your mind.

Making the world a better place, making the dream a happier place,

is not going to work.

When you bring light to darkness, all you get is more darkness.

That's what he meant in the line I read to you earlier,

from the beginning of “Light in the Dream”,

“Each dream has led to other dreams, and every fantasy

that seemed to bring a light into the darkness but made the darkness deeper.”

That’s why for 2000 years Christianity has evolved into

a religion of hate and persecution, the Inquisition, the Crusades,

bigotry, judgment, condemnation, murder, specialness, exclusion.

Why? Because the darkness of the ego system got even darker,

because there was the illusion of it being light-filled,

what all Christianity did, which is the same as any “ism” does or has done,

is that it brought the light into the dream, into the darkness,

at which point it became part of the darkness.

But the followers believed they had the light,

which meant they were not aware of the darkness of the secret dream,

so the hate just kept spewing forth.

A savior, whose purpose was to lead everyone beyond specialness,

became so incredibly special that he elevated

specialness into a religion to be worshipped.

That’s why, in the Course in the early pages,

Jesus goes to such lengths to say, I am no different from you.

I am not the Son of God, we are all the Son of God.

He’s trying to undo and to correct all the mistakes of specialness

that the church has perpetrated in his name.

And they did it by bringing the light into the darkness,

rather than bring the darkness of specialness to the light

of the non-specific truth and reality of God’s Love,

they brought the non-specific reality of God’s Love into the dream of specialness.

What the writers of the New Testament did, however well meaning they were,

was they tried to understand the truth of Jesus

within their own context, their own frame of reference.

No wonder it got screwed up so badly.

There is no way as a student of the Course you could read the New Testament

and not be overwhelmed and horrified by the rampant specialness

that pervades almost every page there.

Not everybody is loved; only certain special groups are loved.

And certainly Jesus is loved more than anybody else.

If you try to understand truth from the perspective of fantasy

or you try to understand the state of awakening from the perspective of sleep,

all you’re going to do is make the truth part of the dream.

That’s again, the dream of convenience.

I don’t want to wake up from my sleep and answer the phone,

so I’ll just bring the phone into my dream, and I’ll keep on sleeping.

That’s what the world did with Jesus 2000 years ago.

And that’s what it’s desperately, and unfortunately rather successfully,

doing with the Course. It becomes part of the world.

There is no way that you can integrate the love of God with this world.

What we can do is we can bring this world,

and the thought system that gave rise to this world,

to the reflection of Love’s presence that’s in our minds,

that’s what Jesus represents, that’s what the Holy Spirit represents.