Question 20 from
The Most Commonly Asked Questions About 
A Course in Miracles®

By Gloria and Kenneth Wapnick, Ph.D.

 

Chapter 2:  THE NATURE OF THE SEPARATION


20) What is meant by the Sonship, and who or what is included?

The term Sonship, or Son of God in the Course is used in two ways: to denote the states of reality and illusion. In Heaven, Sonship refers to God's one creation, the Christ Who is God's one Son. That Son, as we have already seen, is totally unified and at one with Himself and with His Creator. On the level of the dream, Sonship refers to all parts of the one split mind that believed it could accomplish the separation, wherein each fragment appears to have a form and "life" of its own. Thus, the so-called animal, vegetable and mineral kingdoms are all as much a part of the Sonship as is homo sapiens. Distinctions of what is animate and inanimate were arbitrarily introduced by homo sapiens, following the ego's teachings, in order to be able to categorize and control an illusory world and to have "dominion over every living thing" (Genesis, 1:26,28). Such a belief is what A Course in Miracles refers to as the first law of chaos, that there is a "hierarchy of illusions" (T-23.11.2:3) wherein some aspects of the illusion are considered to be higher, more evolved, or more spiritually inclined than others, as when scientists speak of the "chain of being," for example, where, by implication, there is a range of life and non-life. In fact, however, all the forms of "life" are the same, because they all are equal in their being projections of the ego thought of life-apart-from-God. This is the defense against the thought (or memory) of Life that is held by the Holy Spirit in the minds of all the seeming fragments. This is what is meant by the following passage, given in the form of a prayer from Jesus to God our Father:

I thank You, Father, knowing You will come to close each little gap that lies between the broken pieces of Your holy Son. Your holiness, complete and perfect, lies in every one of them [through the Holy Spirit]. And they are joined because what is in one is in them all. How holy is the smallest grain of sand, when it is recognized as being part of the completed picture of God's Son! The forms the broken pieces seem to take mean nothing. For the whole is in each one. And every aspect of the Son of God is just the same as every other part (T-28.IV.9; italics ours).
The thought of the separated Son in the mind, therefore, is not form, but content. And this is the thought that one could be separate from one's Creator, and independent of Him. The form this thought takes -- animate or inanimate, a single-celled organism or mammal -- is irrelevant, because the thought remains the same. And beyond each thought is the Thought of God, held in safekeeping by the Holy Spirit until the instant we return to it.

Reproduced with the kind permission of Gloria and Kenneth
Wapnick and the Foundation for A Course in Miracles®
 

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