How did we get here? If our story began in the womb of our Parent, where thoughts weren’t scrambled with nonsense from nowhere, where it was safe to create, how did we trip the breaker? How did we jettison ourselves out of consciousness and into another reality?
30 years ago, Ken Wapnick published Love Does Not Condemn, a treatise subtitled “The World, the Flesh, and the Devil According to Platonism, Christianity, Gnosticism, and A Course in Miracles.” He wrote that no philosophy or religion explains the loss of consciousness that precipitated this seminal event. A Course in Miracles picks up the story afterward, with spiritual psychology and clues to what went before. But, basically, we’re left to figure it out for ourselves.
Not having a plausible answer to how we got here, that spares us false assumptions about our fatal flaw, our eternal sin, disgrace, and shame, leaves untouched a terminally toxic pollutant within the human soul. Our psyche is ridden with guilt. And it is the projection of guilt onto others, to get rid of it, that ultimately accounts for our suffering and appalling inhumanity. It doesn’t Make Happy; it makes miserable.
The flaw in our thinking begins with our basic identity. No account treats what transpired after our birth, the mistake we made, as the act of a child. Our corrupted minds suspect the act of a fully developed malefactor. And on this assumption rests spurious belief systems with senseless body-centered rituals, unyielding canons, arbitrary demands for sacrifice, and gratuitous cruelties.
What tidings can I share over the holidays? I’m writing a commentary on Ken Wapnick’s book that lays out a theory: what exactly the innocent Child did that tripped the breaker; that caused him or her to lose consciousness; to yield to an onslaught of viral, illusory thoughts from non-Being; to descend into madness; to try to project his guilt to get rid of it; to try to separate from the terrible specter of a wrathful Parent; and, in so doing, to try to split Being, inter-connectedness itself, a thought so insane that it produced the Big Bang, the mother of all atom-splitting nuclear explosions. All of this the act of an innocent Child not in his right mind, dreaming illusory thoughts in his sleep.
This is what I’m up to, theorizing on the meaning of life and the origin and fate of the universe, from A Course in Miracles and other sources. All for one purpose: Making Happy. Whether I succeed or not, it’s great fun trying.
Dave Harrison
Excerpted from annual Christmas letter
December 2019