“You who believe that the Divine is fear made just one substitution [in place of Reality]. This was the substitution of fragmentation for Wholeness, which has since taken many forms. Wholeness has become splintered and subdivided and divided again, over and over, so that it is now almost impossible to perceive that It once was One, and still is what It was. That one error, which brought Truth to be perceived as illusion, Infinity as time, and Life as death, was all you ever made in this world. Your entire world rests upon this error. Everything you look upon reflects it. . . . You have been surprised at hearing how very different Reality is from what you perceive the world to be. This surprise is because you do not realize the magnitude of that one original error. It was so vast and so completely incredible that from it a world of total unreality had to emerge. What else could come of it? Its fragmented aspects are fearful enough as you begin to perceive them clearly. But nothing you have ever perceived begins to show you the enormity of the original error, which seemed to cast you out of the Realm of Heaven, to shatter Knowledge into meaningless bits of disunited perceptions, and to force you to further substitutions. That was the first projection of error outward. The world of illusions arose to hide the error, and became the screen on which the error was projected, and drawn between you and Truth.”
This strange mis-projection that is perceived as a world of lack and misery seemingly outside of and surrounding us was initially done and is maintained by those who appear to be trapped in it for one reason, which is the core of every illusion and problem perceived and experienced in the world and in our lives. This reason, and cause of the dream we find ourselves in, is that, at a certain instant that became the starting point of this world and the beginning of the detour out of Eternity and into time, some of the Divine Children, in exercising their own creative Power given to them by their Creator, directed their Power along a certain line of thought, that of the making of a pseudo-self for themselves. “Into Eternity, where all is One, there crept a tiny, mad idea, at which some of the Children of the Divine forgot to laugh. In their forgetting did the thought become a serious idea, and possible of both accomplishment and real effects.”
“‘Eating of the tree of knowledge’ is a symbolic expression for incorporating into the self the false belief in the ability for self-creation. The ability for self-creation is the only sense in which the Divine and Its Children are not Cocreators, that is, do not have like creative abilities. The belief that they are or do is implicit in the malleable concept of the ‘self’ in place of the unchanging Reality of the Self, a concept that by its very weakness became acceptable to minds that had adopted the false belief in the ability for self-creation, and explained by a tendency of the self to create an image of itself.”
The Course calls this idea of becoming our own creators or authors of our own reality “the authority problem,” and identifies this as the source of “the basic conflict” in our lives between fear and Love (though not between Love and fear, because Love can never be in conflict) that we all experience in this world and that must be resolved to escape or awaken from the world.
“The strain of constant judgment is virtually intolerable. It is a curious thing that any ability that is so debilitating should be so deeply cherished. But there is a very understandable reason for this. If you wish to be the author of your own reality, which is totally impossible in any case, then you will insist on holding on to judgment. You will also use the term with considerable fear and believe that judgment will someday be used against you. To whatever extent it does happen to be used against you by others, it is due only to your belief in its effectiveness as a weapon of defense on behalf of what you believe to be your own authority.
“The issue of authority is really a question of authorship. When people have an ‘authority problem’ it is always because they believe themselves to be the authors or creators of themselves, and resent that they have to project this delusion onto others and convince them to share in this fallacy. They then perceive the situation as one in which any number of people are figuratively and sometimes literally fighting for the validity of their own authorship. This is the fundamental error of all those who believe they have usurped the Power of the Creator, the true Author of Reality and of all Children of the Divine. This delusionary belief is very frightening to those who have accepted it, but hardly troubles the Creator at all. The Creator is, however, intent to undo it, not to punish Its Children, but only because It knows that the belief makes them unhappy.”
This original error of believing that we could create ourselves was like children playing at make believe, a kind of silly alternative to our eternal creation by our Creator, though it was an impossibility for us to create such a self for ourselves in Reality, for only the Creator creates Itself. However, in following that line of thought with their creative Power, these Children of the Divine then wove another related thought out of nothing: that through making a pseudo-self for themselves – the “ego” – they had created themselves in a way their Creator hadn’t created them, and in so doing that they had usurped the Power of their Creator. They wove a further meaningless thought in that same instant, namely that for doing what they believed they had done, i.e., usurping the Power of their Creator, they would incur the wrath of their Creator, a completely insane idea for two reasons. First, it is impossible for the Creator to have attack thoughts or to engage in wrath, vengeance, or condemnation of any kind. Second, it is the Will of the Creator that Its Children exercise their creative Power just as their Creator did and does, though of course not that their creative activity would ever bring them anything but complete Joy.
“Sickness and death entered the mind of the Divine’s Children in opposition to Its Will. The ‘attack on the Divine’ made Its Children think they were creator-less, and out of their depression they made the god of depression. This was their alternative to Joy, because they would not accept the fact that, although they are creators, they had been created. Yet the Child is helpless without the Creator, Who alone is Its Help. This Course said before that of yourself you can do nothing, but you are not of yourself. If you were, then what you made would be true, and you could never escape it. It is because you did not make yourself that you need be troubled by nothing. Your gods and idols are nothing, because your Creator did not create them. You cannot make creators who are unlike your Creator, any more than It could have created a Child who was unlike Itself. If creation is sharing, it cannot create what is unlike itself. It can share only what it is.”
In following this line of false thought through these three iterations – believing that they had created a pseudo-self, that they had usurped the Power of their Creator in doing so, and that they had incurred the wrath of their Creator for doing so – these Children of the Divine believed that they had “sinned” or become irreparably flawed. They then projected a world outside themselves in an extraordinarily consequential but misguided act of Power, namely, to avoid what they believed would be their Creator’s wrath against them for what they believed was their sin. “A dream of judgment came into the mind that the Divine created perfect as Itself. And in that dream was Heaven changed to hell, and the Divine made enemy unto Its Children.”
The process of projecting a world that seems to be outside of us, in all its amazing details, in order to appear to be victims of this world to avoid guilt for making it, is called “the separation” and occasionally the “detour into fear” or “time of terror” in the Course. In the dimension of time, the separation or the making of the world perceived outside ourselves took place over vast eons, though the act of falling asleep into the dream world happened immediately the instant the mind became split.