An examination of the ego thought system and its origins reveals that all guilt, fear, and suffering trace back to a single mistaken belief—that separation from Source ever occurred. Simulating is grounded in this same understanding: that our burdens are not external or circumstantial, but internal and subconscious, and that remembering who we really are requires moving beyond the ego's mistaken belief.
Gary: “So, the first thing you gotta understand is that there are only two things, and that only one of them is real. What’s real is God or Heaven or your Source or Home or reality or whatever you wanna call it. But no matter what you call it, it’s perfect. As both the Bible and A Course in Miracles put it: God is perfect Love. Now this perfect love is not shifting or changing. It’s absolute stillness. If it were shifting or changing, it would be evolving; and if it were evolving, it wouldn’t be perfect. But reality is already perfect; it doesn’t have to improve itself. And this is everyone’s reality. This perfect love cannot be taught or explained, but it can be experienced, even when we appear to be here in a body.
Now, if God is perfect love, then all it would know how to do would be to love. If it knew how to do anything else, then it wouldn’t be perfect love, would it? That’s an important point when it comes to understanding the nondualistic nature of the Course. But then there’s this other thing that thinks it’s here. It’s not really here, but it thinks it is. This thing thinks it has separated itself from its Source and has taken on an individual identity of its own. We’ll call that the ego. And the ego is mostly unconscious. It’s underneath the surface. We see only a small part of it with the conscious mind, and most of it is hidden from us. And in the part that’s hidden, there’s this tremendous guilt over seeming to separate from God.
That’s what you might call the original sin—not that there’s really any sin, but it’s the idea of being separate. That made consciousness, because in order to have consciousness you’ve gotta have more than one thing: a subject and an object. Then you have something else to be conscious of. In reality, there is no subject or object, just perfect oneness. So to make a long story short, you don’t have to struggle to be what you already are. The real you is already perfect and changeless. All you need to do is undo the false you that thinks it has separated itself from its Source—the false you that believes it is guilty.
PURSAH: And if God is pure, absolute perfect love, then how could there ever be this thought of separation in the first place?
GARY: Aha! That’s a trick question. A Course in Miracles is teaching that the full awareness of the Atonement “is the recognition that the separation never occurred.” In other words, the separation is a delusion, a dream, a projection of a universe of time and space. And the answer to that delusion cannot be found on our own with just our intellect, which the ego often uses to keep us seemingly stuck here. The separation is a false experience. And the real answer to the separation is to replace it with a true experience, which is the awareness of perfect oneness with God.
In that condition, you are no longer a separate being, but one with all creation, and that experience is the Answer to what we call life. In fact, in that experience there are no questions, only the Answer. Then you temporarily return here to the false experience of separation, and it turns out you were dreaming the questions! Because the questions don’t exist in reality, which is the experience of perfect love that is one with our Source, and which becomes our permanent reality once we lay the body aside for the final time.