To understand how “the detour into fear” came about, it’s necessary to let go of worldly concepts of personal individuality, which are constructs of the mind, and allow a deeper understanding to take root, one that bypasses the intellect and is anchored instead in the heart. The heart is our connection to God’s Mind, to Self, and can comprehend what our limited minds cannot.

The detour into fear came about as the result of a choice freely made with God’s Will. Contained within the knowing of I Am is the potential of there being an opposite: That-Which-I-Am-Not, or other. That single idea seeds separation by allowing God’s Mind to entertain of Its own free will the idea of otherness, and allowing Itself to enter into an experience where It seems to be what It is not—where something separate from itself can exist. The Mind, with its power to insert itself into its own imaginings, much like we have the power to insert ourselves into our daydreams and lose ourselves there for a while, felt the fear of separation arise within this imagining, and instead of turning from it, took the detour into fear and seemed to lose itself in the dream. Thus did the separate self arise.

This didn’t happen in some long ago past. Past, present, and future all belong to time, which is a mental construct meaningful only to the limited mind of the separate self in the world of form. When this is fully comprehended it becomes easy to see that salvation lies only in healing separation Now.

Any attempt to articulate the process giving rise to the separation is merely metaphorical. The limited intellect of the self can think only in terms of time and space and objects, while understanding how the split occurs requires letting go of the need to think with those terms. Because of Who we are, though, we can understand how the separation comes about. But not with the intellect.

Deep within is a Knowing that knows, and that understands, and remembers. This is the Self, the Truth of us, That which knows Its wholeness in God, and which calls to us to relinquish our misunderstandings and return to the knowing of the truth of ourselves as happy, whole, and loving in God.

“To extend is a fundamental aspect of God which He gave to His Son. In the creation, God extended Himself to His creations and imbued them with the same loving Will to create…The inappropriate use of extension, or projection, occurs when you believe that some emptiness or lack exists in you, and that you can fill it with your own ideas instead of truth…These related distortions represent a picture of what actually occurred in the separation, or the “detour into fear.” None of this existed before the separation, nor does it actually exist now. (T-2.I.1-2)

“Let us return the dream he gave away unto the dreamer, who perceives the dream as separate from himself and done to him. Into eternity, where all is one, there crept a tiny, mad idea, at which the Son of God remembered not to laugh. In his forgetting did the thought become a serious idea, and possible of both accomplishment and real effects. Together, we can laugh them both away, and understand that time cannot intrude upon eternity. It is a joke to think that time can come to circumvent eternity, which means there is no time.” (T-27.VIII.6)