THE COURSE'S USE OF LANGUAGE - I
THE SYMBOLISM OF DUALITY, (part 3)

Continuation of Chapter 2,  FEW CHOOSE TO LISTEN from
Volume Two of THE MESSAGE OF A COURSE IN MIRACLES®

By Kenneth Wapnick, Ph.D.
 
 

Non-Duality
The Problem for Students of A COURSE IN MIRACLES

 
A fuller treatment of the nature of God and Heaven can be found in All Are Called, Chapter One, but for our purposes here, a brief overview of the dimensions of this non-dualistic reality is sufficient. We begin with what alone is true: God and His creation. A Course in Miracles is quite emphatic that Heaven is the only reality and as Christ, our "only real relationship" is with God (T-15.VIII.6:6). This relationship is of total oneness, with no differentiation between Creator and Created, Cause and Effect, God and Christ. As Jesus teaches about Heaven in the Course:

Heaven is not a place nor a condition. It is merely an awareness of perfect Oneness, and the knowledge that there is nothing else; nothing outside this Oneness, and nothing else within (T-18.VI.1:5-6).

This is the state of non-duality, where there is no dualistic presence in Heaven, but only One: "nowhere does the Father end, the Son begin as something separate from Him" (W-pl.132.12:4). In an earlier book, Gloria and I described Heaven this way:

... in the Beginning, before there was even a concept of beginning, there is God, our Source and the Source of all creation: a perfection and resplendence whose magnificence is beyond comprehension; love and gentleness of such an infinite nature that consciousness could not even begin its apprehension; a pristine stillness of uninterrupted joy; a motionless flow without friction to impede it; a vast, limitless, and all-encompassing Totality, beyond space, beyond time, in which there is no beginning, no ending, for there was never a time or place when God was not....

Creation, like spirit, is abstract, formless, and unchanging. Its nature is unity, knowledge of which is that there is nowhere the Creator ends and the created begins. There is no boundary, no differentiation, no separation. Yet, included in this knowledge is the fact that we are not the Source of creation, though we remain One within It.

Can the Mind of God begin? Can the Mind of God end? Can a Thought that is part of that Mind be something other than that Mind? Surely not, since there is no subject or object in the state of Heaven; no observer or observed. There is no perception, simply the total knowledge of who we are: a glory of such unified resplendence that concepts of within-without have no meaning (Awaken from the Dream, pp. 3-4).

A Course in Miracles itself provides many lovely passages that depict this non-dualistic state of Oneness, and many of these statements emphasize Heaven's inherent ineffability:

It should especially be noted that God has only one Son. If all His creations are His Sons, every one must be an integral part of the whole Sonship. The Sonship in its oneness transcends the sum of its parts (T-2.VII.6:1-3).

Love cannot judge. As it is one itself, it looks on all as one.  Its meaning lies in oneness. And it must elude the mind that thinks of it as partial or in part. There is no love but God's, and all of love is His. There is no other principle that rules where love is not. Love is a law without an opposite.  Its wholeness is the power holding everything as one, the link between the Father and the Son which holds Them Both forever as the same (W-pI.127.3; italics mine).

Communication, unambiguous and plain as day, remains unlimited for all eternity. And God Himself speaks to His Son, as His Son speaks to Him.  Their language has no words, for what They say cannot be symbolized.  Their knowledge is direct and wholly shared and wholly one (W-pI.129.4:1-4; italics mine).

As nothingness cannot he pictured, so there is no symbol for totality. Reality is ultimately known without a form, unpictured and unseen (T-27.111.5:1-2).

Oneness is simply the idea God is. And in His Being, He encompasses all things. No mind holds anything but Him. We say "God is," and then we cease to speak, for in that knowledge words are meaningless. There are no lips to speak them, and no part of mind sufficiently distinct to feel that it is now aware of something not itself. It has united with its Source, And like its Source Itself, it merely is.

We cannot speak nor write nor even think of this at all (W-pI.169.5:1- 6:1).

We can see clearly that there is no way the state of a non-dualistic Heaven can be understood by a brain that has been programmed by the guilty and dualistic mind not to understand non-duality, the state that constitutes the gravest threat to individual and specific existence. And so we come to the crux of the issue: how to speak of the non-dualistic truth to dualistic minds -- and therefore brains -- that can literally not understand this truth. That is the challenge met by Jesus in A Course in Miracles, which teachings come from truth to a world of illusion that does not believe in, nor even recognize this truth.