The metaphysics of ACIM and UU - The origin of the world

Chapter one

The origin of the world

There are many origin of the world stories in many cultures. A Course In Miracles provides one that is conceptual and not in the form of an anthropological story. ACIM tells us that there are two worlds: the world of the ego and the world of the spirit. The world of the Spirit is Oneness. Oneness is a major concept in the perennial psychology. The mystical traditions in all major world religions recognize this Oneness and hold it up as “home” from which our human experience has emerged.

This emergence from the Oneness is what A Course In Miracles calls “the separation.” Further, ACIM calls the separation “a tiny mad idea.” This tiny mad idea that we can be separate from the Oneness is a joke at which we forgot to laugh. We forgot to laugh because we fail to remember what we have done. This is the apple that Adam and Eve ate in the garden. The apple was denial and forgetfulness. The perennial psychology tells us that we should “wake up” we should become aware of the Oneness from which we have separated ourselves and think we have left.

The creation story of A Course In Miracles is a story of running away from home and then forgetting that there is even a home which we have left, and even if we slightly remember the home we have run away from, we have forgotten the route back.

The world we have created when we ran away from home, ACIM tells us, is not real. It doesn’t really exist. We have just made it up. It is Truman’s world (referring to the movie starring Jim Carey), or the shadows dancing on the wall in Plato’s great story of the cave.

And so when we dimly remember that there is a reality from which we have emerged in the separation we have a choice to make about whether we want to continue to pursue the experience of the world of the ego, or return to the world of the spirit from which we have come.

Unitarian Universalism, based on its fourth principle, encourages us to engage in a free and responsible search for truth and meaning. However, it does not teach us where truth and meaning is to be found. It fact it often sends us on a wild goose chase when it suggests that truth and meaning are to be found in social justice projects. 

Truth and meaning are to be found in what A Course In Miracles calls the “atonement” which is the recognition that we have separated ourselves from the Oneness in pursuit of things of the ego. We have mistakenly made these things on the path of the ego idols. We believe that acquiring or obtaining these things on the path of the ego will make us happy. We are always, eventually, disappointed with the results of this erroneous quest. We wind up looking for love in all the wrong places. Love is to be found in the return to the Oneness, the thought of which terrifies most people because it requires a giving up of the ego.

The Universalists know and have taught that we are all in this quest together and that return to the Oneness, “universal salvation,” is inevitable. The only question is how long it will take humanity to remember its true source and to choose to abide there. When one person rejects the path of the ego and embraces the path of the Spirit and returns to the Oneness all of humanity takes a step forward on its path to salvation.