Book I establishes:
Reality is good, ordered, relational, differentiated without separation, and created from divine fullness.
Book II answers:
What could possibly go wrong in such a Reality?
Book II is the book of the impossible rupture.
Its deepest subject is not sin in the ordinary moralistic sense. It is the birth of the false premise:
I can exist apart from my Source.
The ego, exile, duality, guilt, fear, death, domination, projection, false authorship, the Wasteland, the Demiurge, the False King, imprisonment in matter, and the dream-world are all downstream manifestations of one primordial error.
The Anatomy of the Fall
- The impossible wish — desire for independent being or authorship.
- Misuse of freedom — autonomy interpreted as separation from Source.
- False authorship — the Son attempts to make himself and his own kingdom.
- Division of mind — truth remains known at one level while denied at another.
- Guilt — the mind believes it has attacked God and reality.
- Fear — punishment and annihilation are expected.
- Projection — internal conflict is externalized.
- The world — a perceived realm of separation appears.
- The ego — the false self becomes the narrator and ruler of the dream.
- Amnesia — the Son forgets his origin.
- Exile — the dreamer identifies with a body in time.
- Wasteland, Domination, scarcity…— the social and cosmic Wasteland unfolds.
Pre-fall: I am because God gives me being. The Fall: I am because I possess myself.
Book I: The other is different from me and belongs with me in the Whole. Book II: The other is outside me and therefore rival, threat, object, or possession.
Book I: Creativity is participation. Book II: Creativity is private authorship.
Book I: Hierarchy is ordered service. Book II: Hierarchy becomes domination.
Book I: Love gives. Book II: Desire takes.
Book I: Freedom fulfills nature. Book II: Freedom rejects nature and Source.
Book I: The Crown is inherited. Book II: The Crown is seized.
Every later Book is, in some way, the rectification of a power distorted in Book II.
The Knight redeems strength. The Lover redeems desire. The Bard redeems imagination. The Builder redeems order. The Prophet redeems speech and authority. The Disciple redeems love and will through surrender. The Wizard redeems knowledge and power. The King redeems sovereignty. Christ redeems Sonship itself.
The Royal Art Doctrine of the Fall
Twelve axioms
- Reality as created by God remains wholly perfect, infinite, eternal, good…..
- The Fall does not occur in God or his Creation, but in the mind of the Son.
- The Fall begins with the impossible wish for independent authorship and power beyond one’s birthright.
- Separation is impossible in Reality but experientially real within the dream.
- The ego is the thought-system that preserves belief in separation.
- Guilt and fear follow from the belief that the Son attacked his Source and has separated from his Father.
- Projection externalizes the split mind as a world of separate forms.
- Time, space, scarcity, conflict, and death are structures of the separation-dream that exist to prove the reality of separation, the ego, and the Son’s created false reality.
- Evil is distortion and misrelation of good powers, not an equal principle to God.
- The Son never loses his true identity, only awareness of it.
- The Holy Spirit enters the dream as the voice of and for God and it works to weave the path of return.
- Salvation is remembrance of Reality, Truth and the Kingdom. It is attained through forgiveness and it is completed in the Atonement, the restoration of the Son as Christ.