A Course in Miracles and the Borg

Ok, for all you Trekkies and former Trekkies out there, I know you’ve been looking for that fundamental link between A Course in Miracles and the voyage of the Starship Enterprise. At long last I believe I’ve found it in, of all places, the Borg. I know, I know, the Borg seems to be the true opposite of anything spiritual, but give me a minute to explain.

This all has to do with the concept of God. For most of us in the world, to the extent we are taught and grow to believe in a concept of God, we see God as something separate, something outside ourselves. Even if our souls are made of God stuff, when acting within this world we’re always making choices and being watched by God as we do. It’s like we’re corporate spin-offs from God with a separate identity and where the CEO of the spin-off is our individual self or ego. This self makes choices, always with free will, and these choices will someday be judged.

The judgment factor means there’s a set of rules we’re acting for or against, and if we understand those rules properly and chose correctly, we can achieve happiness and eventually live in some kind of Heaven. Alternatively if we make the wrong choices, we are destined to either live in Hell or to continue to reincarnate into this world over and over as we somehow work off our karma. In either case, making the wrong choice, going against the rules, will lead to unhappiness.

Even the reality creation, law of attraction concept requires some greater power, often just referred to as the Universe, to bring manifestations into existence. This Universe seems to be benign, but once again we’re stuck with free will, and in this case, no moral sense of what or why we’re manifesting. Suppose everyone in the world decided they wanted a Mercedes – could six billion Mercedes appear, and where would all that gasoline come from? There needs to be a meaningful purpose behind all of this.

The Course describes something very different – a God with a collective Mind. There is no soul, no spin-off, no separate identity or personality. This God is Everything, and within the Mind of this God, thinking is a shared process – actually more than shared, since there is nothing outside to share with, it’s only God thinking with Itself. This idea of a collective Mind can be very disturbing, for in our everyday lives, there is always something separate, called myself, who is thinking.

So, you might ask, what does this have to do with the Borg? Star Trek: The Next Generation TV show, like all the Star Treks, involves the exploration of space in which all manner of good and evil presents itself. Throughout the series the most intriguing of their adversaries were the Borg, who were unique in that their purpose wasn’t to kill others to gain territory or resources. Their mission was to assimilate all the sentient beings they encountered in their travels through the universe, and once assimilated, these beings, including humans, would become part of the collective mind that was the Borg.

To the humans, who were perfect examples of strong, separated individuation, being assimilated by the collective mind of the Borg was the most frightening thing in the universe, more frightening than death itself. By becoming part of the Borg, one knew the thoughts of all the other Borg and one acted with the sole purpose of maintaining and expanding the Borg. The bodies of the individual Borg were depicted in the most disgusting manner, with tubes running in and out, and some kind of green liquid coursing through them.

There was one episode where a Borg became disconnected from the collective, and the entire hour was spent trying to retrain this one to think like an individual, giving it a name to distinguish it from others, teaching it to listen only to its own thoughts, and ultimately turning it into a duplicate of a human. There was never any questioning in the episode that this individual state was vastly superior to the state of collective consciousness.

In many ways the Borg is similar to the concept of God from the Course – a collective mind, the possibility, at least, of becoming everything in the universe – but there is one critical missing aspect – Love. The Borg were the antithesis of Love. They were powerful, judgmental, hateful, and only out for themselves, but they wanted everyone else to become a part of them.

We can turn to the Course and the idea of separation to see how the Borg and the ego’s idea of ‘God’ relate. The idea of separation begins with a belief that something separate from God can exist. In order to maintain this idea, the experience of the Loving God must be avoided at all costs. One way to do this is to create the idea of fear and, consequently, the idea of something to be feared.

In this scenario, God becomes the focus of the fear; for if we do not fear God and were to re-experience the God of Pure Love, the illusion of separation would fall apart. One way to create a fear of God is to see this new ‘God’ as an enemy who is out to harm us in some way, perhaps by judging us and potentially wanting to punish us for what we have done. This may sound preposterous, since God, by definition is Pure Love, but it shows how absurd the idea of separation is and how much must be done to prop it up.

This new ‘God’ that the separation thoughts created, the fearsome, judgmental ‘God,’ is the most feared thing to the ego, to our individual personalities or selves. It’s the most deep-seated fear we have, the original fear, so to speak, and whenever we see aspects of a collective mind, the ego tells us we must avoid it at all costs. That ‘God’ is missing the same aspect the Borg is missing – Love in its purest form.

So the story of the Borg becomes an allegory where the travelers on the Enterprise represent the ego, our individuated personality. The Borg represents the fearsome ‘God’ with it’s collective mind and it’s desire to assimilate us. In this story we must avoid this assimilation for ourselves and all others at all costs, even to the point of death.

By realizing that this ‘God’ is just another of the endless illusions presented to us by the ego, and by forgiving this ‘God’ and all the other ego illusions, we can begin to free ourselves from the ego’s plan of separation. We need to throw out those old concepts of ‘God’ and accept the God as described in the Course, a God of Pure Love and Pure Mind. This new God becomes a thing of beauty and joy, a collective Mind into which we will ultimately return. It’s time to ignore all those fearful images of collectivism that the ego presents to us and embrace the one and only collective, the True Loving God.