The Universe is a Dream by Alexander Marchand (from Leo’s book list)

[Michael Paul]

For those of you who are unfamiliar with Alexander Marchand, he’s an avid student of A Course in Miracles who created several comic books based off of the fundamental principles of the Course. I have to say that I don’t agree with much of what he (and the Course) says about the nature of reality.

Marchand makes the claim in the book (copied straight from A Course in Miracles) that the mind of God dreamt up this universe “as an attack on God”, which doesn’t make sense because how could creation ever be separate from Oneness?

He also talks about how the point of life is to wake up out of the dream, but in his paradigm doesn’t that mean to physically die? I understand awakening in the sense of becoming “lucid in the dream”, but to actually wake up out of the Universe? I don’t buy it.

Even if this reality is a dream, it doesn’t mean it was created as an attack on God. That’s a concept from the Course that simply makes no sense to me. It’s dark and doesn’t ring true to me. Thoughts?

Edited September 30, 2019 by Michael Paul

[daramantus]

No, if you wanna take this philosophy as serious, it actually makes sense from this POV that it is God who is dreaming up the Universe, it's God who imagines and re-creates your house everyday, also re-creates your brain and etc, not you or your consciousness, and God doesn't hallucinate, because 'hallucination' is a human term that wouldn't exist if there was no 'hallucination' to compare to reality. So God's creating "matter", would be what we call reality and others would also see the same. 

Look, this is not something I'm making up, a blind and deaf person from blind, without the capacity of imagining anything in their minds, without the capacity of imagining, no matter how much LSD it takes and how many deep layers they reach and higher states of consciousness, they will never see anything, mind's eye totally blind, still they were born, and live in the world. Why is that so? To solve this problem and paradox, you would have to say it's God who creates matter and reality, not our consciousness/subconscious.

Now if you wanna say you can be one with God using drugs, sure, I respect that.

[ZenBlue]

What I got out of this book is:

- We started out as an absurd joke. A fleeting thought in God's mind. The thought was, what if I created something that is separate from me. Thus the ego was born. In God's mind, the thought is over and done.

- The ego however clings to it's own false existence. The ego which was born from the thought of separateness from God then created this entire universe and the world we live in to trick itself and hide from God.

- This world is an illusion, which was created by an illusion.

- We are not really separate from God, we are in God's mind tricking ourselves into thinking we are outside of God.

- The way to wake up is through true forgiveness.

- If we don't wake up, then we will reincarnate over and over again in different bodies living life through different experiences.

- Thus the world we live in is actually hell (separation from God). Everything we do is merely a substitute for God as we make vain attempts to fill the empty void we feel from our separation from God.

I don't fully understand everything, and this still leaves a lot of questions unanswered to me. What is the point of waking up one aspect of myself when there will be infinite aspects of me that will continue to remain asleep? It is a never ending game of creating new unconscious bodies, while a small percentage of those unconscious bodies eventually wake up and return to God.  Maybe it's merely for the love of playing this game...