Another world awaits us

You dwell not here, but in eternity.
You travel but in dreams, while safe at home. T-13.VII.17:6-7

The above quote so beautifully tells us that this world is not our home. It is pointless to try to find permanent peace and joy in what the world has to offer. How can a dream satisfy? To pursue pleasure automatically brings pain. They are two sides of the same coin. First there is the fear that we will not attain what we crave. If we do attain it we will fear to lose it or grow tired of our prize and start searching over again. This very search for satisfaction blocks the awareness that God has given us everything at our creation.

The Course explains to us that in our desire for something different, to play at being God and become individuals we had to fall asleep in Heaven. It is only in the dream state we can achieve our desire for separation. To maintain the illusion that we have really achieved our goal of separation we need to make our dream seem very solid. The section in the Text on the Obstacles to Peace states how attached we are to the body, guilt, pain and death for they seem to make this world real. Just one look at what is portrayed in the media will show us what we give our interest to. There is nothing like pain to make this world true and what the Course states as truth a lie. We pursue our relationships of 'special hate' (choosing someone to project our guilt onto) and 'special love' (needy relationships used as a substitute for God's love) as they are are our best safeguard from waking up and returning to the awareness of God's love for us which would shatter our precious dream of individuality.

All your time is spent in dreaming. Your sleeping and your waking dreams have different forms, and that is all. Their content is the same. They are your protest against reality, and your fixed and insane idea that you can change it. In our waking dreams, the special relationship is your determination to keep your hold on unreality, and to prevent yourself from waking. And while you see more value in sleeping than in waking, you will not let go of it.
A Course in Miracles T-18.II.5:12-20

Sometimes something happens to shake the reality of our collective dream and fear is the usual result. I can remember watching a play on television that had caught my attention. Suddenly part of the picture broke up and the face of the actor speaking became a series of small squares. I felt a fear go through me that what I was so intently watching a moment ago was simply an illusion. I used to teach electronics and understood how pictures are displayed on a cathode ray tube. I also knew how distortions could occur just like the one I had seen. But none of this knowledge prevented the small wave of fear that swept through me. What I had been reminded of was that what I had taken for reality had dissolved for a moment. I could sense that I did not want my everyday world to start shaking at the edges, for the illusion to reveal itself as it is. As we start to awaken from the dream of separation and another world becomes apparent our egos become terrified. What should be an uplifting experience may well become a terrifying one. Jesus warns us early in the study of the Text that:

This is a course in mind training. All learning involves attention and study at some level. Some of the later parts of the course rest too heavily on these earlier sections not to require their careful study. You will also need them for preparation. Without this, you may become much too fearful of what is to come to make constructive use of it. However, as you study these earlier sections, you will begin to see some of the implications that will be amplified later on.
T-1.VII.4:1-6 

In the film The Matrix we are shown a world after a war between humans and super intelligent robots where the robots are the winners. The robots still need the humans to live so they are bred in farms and kept asleep. The humans are programmed with a collective dream so they don't realise what's happening to them. The dream seems very realistic and they have no knowledge of their real state. Except for a few humans however, who have succeeded in waking up and escaping from the farm. These awake ones have found a way to enter the collective dream of the other humans and offer them the opportunity to awake as well. As you might imagine, the sleeping ones have a hard time believing the story of the awakened ones and are not sure if it's worth the trouble of waking up.

Jesus has taken on the same role of the awakened ones in The Matrix. He enters our dream (when we invite him) and attempts to teach us that we are asleep and that another world, what the Course call the Real World awaits us. He knows we would be petrified to wake up in one go, even though we may ask for this, and instead gradually leads us from nightmares to happy dreams of forgiveness until we can finally wake up to the perception of the Real World. Now we have become lucid dreamers where we know what we see is a dream and that nothing in it can harm us, become a cause for fear, give us peace or take it away. We see everyone in the dream through the Holy Spirit's judgement as either extending love or asking for it. The Real World is not Heaven but its reflection here in time and space.

The path becomes quite different as one goes along. Nor could all the magnificence, the grandeur of the scene and the enormous opening vistas that rise to meet one as the journey continues, be foretold from the outset. Yet even these, whose splendor reaches indescribable heights as one proceeds, fall short indeed of all that wait when the pathway ceases and time ends with it.
M-19.2:5-7

So how can we wake up from our present nightmares into the perception of the Real World? We simply have to want to above all else. And here lies the problem. Parts of our current dream are seen as undesirable and increasingly so. We gradually become disillusioned with what the ego's world has to offer although once we pursued it with great intent. We start to see the prizes that world offers us come at to higher price - our peace of mind. But parts of the dream still appeal and these we still want. We may see through the deceptions of materialism, status, power, money, ambition, etc. but still be snared by other attractions including the so called spiritual. Perhaps we yearn for a spiritual soul mate, to be seen as spiritual, to find fulfilment in healing and teaching others. But as the Course warns:

Anything in this world that you believe is good and valuable and worth striving for can hurt you, and will do so. Not because it has the power to hurt, but just because you have denied it is but an illusion, and made it real. And it is real to you. It is not nothing. And through its perceived reality has entered all the world of sick illusions.
T-26.VI.1:1--5

Notice the use of the word 'anything'! Any dream, no matter how holy-sounding, is still a trap from waking up to who we really are - the one Christ, the formless eternal spirit that was never born and hence can never die. That is why Jesus never asks us to pursue some goal in the world but to wake up from the dream of separation (what the Course calls accepting the atonement for ourselves). All dreams must finally be given up and the illusion of sacrifice that usually accompanies this thought must be seen through as another ego ploy to delay our awakening.

You cannot dream some dreams and wake from some, for you are either sleeping or awake. And dreaming goes with only one of these. The dreams you think you like would hold you back as much as those in which the fear is seen. For every dream is but a dream of fear, no matter what the form it seems to take.
T-29.IV.1:7-8, T-29.IV.2:1-2,

For many of us, as we get older, the world has less and less to offer us and the message of the Course has an increasing appeal. But still there are aspects of the world that hold our attention and to let these go seems to be a sacrifice. The Development of Trust section in the Manual for Teachers highlights this. Of the six stages in gaining trust four are described as difficult with the illusion of sacrifice being the dominant hindrance to achievement of trust. At the fifth stage of the development of trust we are asked to let go the very individuality we prize so highly. The loss of 'I' is seen by our ego as committing suicide and our resistance to that step is enormous, a true dark night of the soul.

The world can teach no images of you unless you want to learn them. There will come a time when images have all gone by, and you will see you know not what you are. It is to this unsealed and open mind that truth returns, unhindered and unbound. Where concepts of the self have been laid by is truth revealed exactly as it is. When every concept has been raised to doubt and question, and been recognized as made on no assumptions that would stand the light, then is the truth left free to enter in its sanctuary, clean and free of guilt. There is no statement that the world is more afraid to hear than this:

I do not know the thing I am, and therefore do not know what I am doing, where I am, or how to look upon the world or on myself.

Yet in this learning is salvation born. And What you are will tell you of Itself.
T-31.V.17:1-8

Increasingly the world is simply seen as a classroom of forgiveness. A place where relationships of every sort reflects back to us what is unhealed in our own minds - the only place where forgiveness is needed. As we practise our daily lessons of forgiveness our sense of separation slowly diminishes along with our ego identity.

The attachment to being a separate individual is the last dream to let go before we awake to the everlasting peace and joy of the Real World and wonder why we delayed so long to enter it!