The Projection of the World: Thank God it Was Only a Movie | A Course in Miracles

Have you ever watched a film that felt so real, and sucked you in so completely that you were freaking out, shivering on the edge of your seat, or covering your eyes, or felt like you were gonna barf?

That’s what A Course in Miracles teaches that the world of time and space is like. It’s exactly like a movie that we’ve become so over-identified with that we’ve actually forgotten that it’s just a projection on a screen, with actors playing roles.

We’ve bought into the “reality” of it. We’ve breathed life into it with our misperception. We’ve fallen into the land of make-believe.

We think the fake blood is real and the guns are firing real bullets.

We’re praying for a happy ending, but we’re afraid it will never happen.

We’ve gone Hollywood.

Whether the genre of what seems to be happening in our lives is horror, rom-com, tragedy, sci-fi, action, adventure, suspense, historical, or whatever – the story can totally mesmerize us and completely take us over.

We experience powerful, intense feelings of fear, love, anger, triumph, joy, despair, relief, grief, sadness, reassurance, surprise…

A movie is a projection on a screen. It’s basically a double-fake – because you are seeing images of people pretending to be characters.

This is what we do in the world of form. Our minds are the projector – gathering up all of the unconscious guilt we’re harboring in the depths of our minds and deflecting it onto the screen of the world and our bros.

We are also the director of the movie. We have cast every person who appears to be in our lives in the role they are playing – whether they appear to be our beloved romantic partners or our pain in the ass mother-in-law, our precious children or the politician we hate.

We’ve assigned each person their character in our story – heroes, villains, victims – and we wrote the script.

But our back-story is that we did all that and then had complete amnesia and forgot it all – as well as how we got into the movie theater in the first place. As far as we know it’s our ‘hood – it’s all we’ve ever consciously known – we think we were born here.

But we weren’t. We were birthed by extension in the Mind of God.

So, a long time ago (even though time is fake), WAY before any galaxy far, far away…

We as the collective Son of God were chillin’ in the constant, eternal, and all-encompassing ecstasy of our Creator – one with all our bros in a next-level blissful awareness of Heaven, aka complete love, joy, peace. Everything was total perfection – there was no belief in anything separate from anything else, only the changeless, timeless awesomeness of wholeness and oneness forever…

Then we momentarily had a tiny little crazy-ass idea wondering what it would be like to be separate from our Creator – and because the creative power of God is within us, and because we are free to miscreate as well as create – BOOM! The lights went down – as did the Big Bang – and the movie began.

But we don’t have to keep making it real. The first thing we can do is remember that we’re not alone in this experience. We can watch the movie with Jesus – cuz He’s got the subtitles that tell us what’s really going on on the screen, instead of the ego’s catastrophic bullshit translation.

He reminds us that it’s only a movie – and that we’re actually not even in the theater. We’re still at home with God and all our bros – so blissed our and rocking our joy that it would never occur to us to desire a distraction, an escape, or even entertainment.

When you’re living in the awareness of perfect love, the happy ending is now, constant, and… ummm… never ending.

As Jesus tells us in lesson 292 in the Workbook of A Course in Miracles,

“A Happy outcome to all things is sure.”
W-292

When we’ve completed our part of the Atonement by doing all our forgiveness work, those credits will roll for the final time. We might be treated to some funny outtakes, but then this whole epic saga will fade to light.

So while we’re working on changing our reality from virtual to true – we can still totally enjoy the fun parts of the show – the hilarious, romantic, beautiful, feel-good, Love Actually clips. We can also choose alternate endings to the sh*tshow parts – shifting our perception from fear to love through practicing true forgiveness and allowing our vision to be transformed.

This gives us access to a completely different movie – and instead of thinking of them as “my bastard ex-husband” or “that arrogant a-hole” (or both) it becomes one where we have the awareness that our brothers are the innocent actors that they are, playing roles we’ve given them, following a script we wrote.