Name: Our Debt to Freud, Part 1_Excerpt from "A Course in Miracles" Workshop
Uploaded: 2014-01-19T09:24:22.000Z
Duration: 10 min 20 s
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Then again, the Course is not alone in talking   about this world as a dream

But where the Course is alone and is unique,

in that it not only discusses the metaphysical implications,

of this world being a dream, namely that this is an illusion

but also supplies us with the motivation for why we dream here.

And once we talk about dreams and motivation,

obviously we have to talk about Sigmund Freud,

that not only really became the jumping off point

for his whole theoretical work and practical work as an analyst

but it’s also the jumping off point for the whole treatment

and understanding of the ego that you find in the Course.

“There is one wish that every dream is intended to fulfill

though it assumes various forms, that is, the wish to sleep.

You dream to avoid having to wake up because you want to sleep.”

And then in Interpretation of Dreams itself, he echoes that insight and he says,

“Thus the wish to sleep must in every case be reckoned

as one of the motives for the formation of dreams.

Every successful dream is a fulfillment of that wish.”

One of the astonishing things I think when you   read Freud in light of the Course

is to see that everything he’s saying about dreams,

and, of course, he’s only talking about our sleeping dreams,

holds exactly for the way Jesus talks about our waking dreams.

One of the things that Freud did in his understanding of dreams

is that he spoke about two levels of the dream,

what he referred to the as manifest content, which is the dream itself.

When you wake in the morning and you want   to tell someone this dream you had,

what you tell them is the manifest content, what goes on in the dream.

Underneath that, however, is the meaning of the dream,

what Freud referred to as the latent content.

And, of course, it’s this latent content that opens up the understanding

That’s why he said, in a very important statement,

that the understanding and interpretation of dreams

are the “royal road to understanding the activities of the unconscious mind.”

As we’ll see later on today Jesus would make that exact same statement,

except what he means by dreams being the “royal road”

would be our waking dreams, our everyday experiences.

And it’s his helping us to understand what the meaning is

of our everyday experiences that opens up for us

the whole idea that we actually do have a mind.

And, of course, since this mind is totally out of awareness,

but that’s where the thought system of the ego   is, and that, of course, that's where

the correction to the thought system of the   ego is as well, the Holy Spirit.

For our purposes, we’ll think of “separation”

as really being our having fallen asleep,

and what follows from that will constitute the dreams.

So that when we chose, originally as one Son,

to listen to the ego’s interpretation of the tiny, mad idea

the ego’s interpretation being that the tiny, mad idea

of being separate from God is true, in other words,

that we are indeed separate from God, and that’s the birth

of the separated and individual and special self.

And we made that choice because we didn’t like

which basically represents the principle of the Atonement,

the Holy Spirit’s interpretation of the tiny, mad idea,

and that interpretation, in effect, is what tiny, mad idea?

Namely, that there is no separation, nothing happened.

And therefore your belief that you exist as a separated, individual,

unique, autonomous, and special person, is an illusion.

In a sense, that’s the Course’s equivalent for our having fallen asleep.

desperately wants to ensure that the decision that the son made

to choose the ego instead of the Holy Spirit,

That the son would never be able to change his mind.

And so to ensure that the son would never change his mind,

what the Course refers to as the “secret dream”

The secret dream is what you find in the ego box,

specifically when you see error is real, serious

and it consists of the triad of sin, guilt, and fear.

As we’ll see that this would be the secret dream.

To use Freud’s terms, this would be the latent dream,

Now, the ego has this dream, the secret dream,

of sin, guilt, and fear, because we believed

we actually had destroyed Heaven because if I can have a thought

that stands outside and can choose against perfect oneness,

then perfect oneness must be an illusion,

because you can’t have thoughts outside of perfect oneness.

Separation and oneness are mutually exclusive states.

So by virtue of our entertaining that thought and then believing

that we have this self that stands on that thought

of wanting something other than the everything,

that thought itself then means that God has been destroyed.

Now the ego has us dream the secret   dream, of sin, guilt and fear

because the ego wants us to become so terrified   of the contents of this dream