Course Thought System

by Tony Ponticello

Humankind, all of us, was created whole and perfect by an infinite intelligence, an eternal being of Love and Light — God.

This Perfect Creation is the Christ.

Love and Light are the energy and substance of God and the created Christ: us.

God and the Christ are eternal, they are the all that exists.

Everything else is an illusion.

Into this reality, where all was one, a false idea came into the mind of the Christ,
the idea that the Christ could somehow exist without there being a Creator.

This false idea is not a problem, the problem arose
when the creation took the idea seriously and forgot to laugh at it.

That was the original “sin” or the original “mistake”.

The force of this mistake was so seemingly powerful,
that the Christ Mind literally “knocked itself out”. It put itself to sleep.

The creation now became lost in the nightmare it was having while asleep.

This nightmare, is the three-dimensional world of time and space
we appear to find ourselves in.

Since this world is based on the thought that we could cut ourselves off
from light and life, in it are the dark illusions of sickness, death and war.

This is a world of total illusion. Nothing in it is “real”.

However, since we are all still connected to God,
there is still a Voice for God in our minds.

This Voice is the Holy Spirit.

There is another voice that tells us our illusions are true and
that we are separate, isolated entities. This other voice is the ego.

The Holy Spirit is in a continual process of correcting our thinking.

Holy Spirit has a correction for every ego thought of separation.

This process of correcting the ego is called the Atonement.

Once we learn, through the Holy Spirit’s help,
that we are dreaming the world we think we are in, we can change the dream.

Through true forgiveness and non-judgment we correct, or atone for,
the separation idea we forgot to laugh at and our minds start to heal.

The world we now see begins to reflect our healing minds.

The dark illusions of sickness, death and war start to heal.

The world becomes happier and healthier and more full of light.

We call this healed existence the “real world” because it is closer to reality.

Finally, when the mind is totally healed, our Creator, God, wakes us up and
this illusion of what never was simply ceases to be.