“It is the function of the Divine’s teachers to bring true learning to the world. Properly speaking, it is unlearning that they bring, for that is ‘true learning’ in the world.” “In the calm within, the Holy Spirit takes you gently by the hand, and retraces with you your mad journey outside yourself, leading you gently back to the Truth and Safety within. It brings to the Truth all your insane projections and your wild substitutions that you have placed outside you. Thus, It reverses the course of madness, and restores you to reason.”
The process of healing what never happened in Reality, but only in a dream, is not one of moving forward through an outer world toward a magical place called paradise that exists somewhere over the rainbow and beyond the clouds, but of moving inward, and backward “out” of what we got ourselves into. “The Divine’s Children are not travelers through outer worlds. However holy their perception may become, no world outside themselves holds their Inheritance.” This process of backing out of our mistakes through correcting them is called “undoing” in the Course. It is understood that because we were created eternally perfect, once we remove the errors that have been skewing our perception and understanding of ourselves and the world and blocking our accessing of Reality and of the Presence of Love, our natural Perfection is what will be left and what we will joyfully rediscover.
“The miracle does nothing. All it does is to undo. And thus it cancels out the interference to what has truly been done in Creation. It does not add, but merely takes away. And what it takes away is long since gone, but being kept in memory appears to have immediate effects. This world was over long ago. The thoughts that made it are no longer in the mind that thought of them, and loved them for a while. The miracle simply shows that the past is gone, and what has truly gone has no effects.”
Undoing can be conceived in the image of having pushed brashly forward into a thicket of thorns, and realizing that the further we push forward trying to force our way through, the more entrapped and torn up by the thorns we become, until we finally understand that there is in fact no way to force our way through, and that the only way forward is to go backward, i.e., to retrace our steps out of the thorns. When we have backed out to that point where we first entered the thicket, we can continue on the way we were going before getting stuck in the thorns. That is the idea of undoing: we progress through returning.
“The evolution of human beings is merely a process by which they proceed from one degree to the next. They correct their previous missteps by stepping forward, progressing. This represents a process that is actually incomprehensible in temporal terms, because each person returns to Reality as they progress. The Atonement is the device by which you can free yourself from the past as you move forward. It undoes your past errors, thus making it unnecessary for you to keep retracing your steps without making real progress toward your return to Reality.”
When we understand this idea, we cease thinking that we can become more and more evolved or perfect in this world until reaching the point that we transcend its limitations. Such beliefs and the efforts at self-improvement that result from them become understood as meaningless when we realize that the only thing that makes sense when finding ourselves stuck in a dream is to awaken from it, not to attempt to make the dream more pleasurable, or to make ourselves more “perfect” in the dream. “The belief that the perfect must be perfected is curious. In fact, perfecting the perfect is impossible. But you must remember that when you put yourself in an impossible situation, you believed that the impossible was possible.”
“The ego can accept the idea that return is necessary, because it can so easily make the idea seem so difficult.” In this regard the Course does not advocate spiritual development, because how can Perfection be developed and improved upon? It guides us, rather, in a comprehensive process of undoing the mistakes we are still holding onto, which have already been forgiven and corrected by the Atonement, to arrive at our true state as we were created. “I am as the Divine created me” is the only Workbook lesson repeated multiple times and in various forms because of its centrality to this perspective of undoing to arrive at what was, is, and will forever be.
Once we are truly awakened, we realize that all of the components of the dream – the good, the bad, the beautiful, the ugly, the comic, the tragic, and the belief that we needed to improve ourselves – were simply dream drama. The principle that “when in a dream, the solution is simply to awaken” is core to the Course. Thus awakening through undoing is our goal. Forgiving, and through this being able to accept our own forgiveness which has already been accomplished, are the key aspects of undoing.
“How simple is awakening! All it says is that what was never true is not true now, and never will be. The impossible has not occurred, and can have no effects. And that is all. Can this be hard to learn by anyone who wants to learn it? Only unwillingness to learn it could make such an easy lesson difficult. How hard is it to see that what is false cannot be true, and what is true cannot be false?”
“Awakening is a paradox indeed! What could it be except a happy dream? For you are asked just to forgive all things that no one ever really did, to see beyond what is not there, and not to look upon the unreal as if it were Reality. You are simply asked to let your true will be done, and seek no longer for the things you do not actually want. And you are asked to let yourself be free of all the dreams of what you never were in Truth, and seek no longer to substitute the strength of idle wishes for the Will of the Divine. Here does the dream of separation start to fade and disappear. For here the gap that is not there begins to be perceived without the toys of terror that you made. No more than this is asked. Be glad indeed that awakening asks so little rather than so much. It asks for nothing in reality. And even in illusions it asks only that forgiveness be the substitute for fear. Such is the only rule for happy dreams.”