God is not a supreme sapien of some sort. God is spirit. So is His Creation, having been created in God’s likeness. Spirit is formless. Since we can not make an image in our mind of the formless, we must use a symbol we can recognize to speak or even think of God. To speak of ‘God the Father’ is to use a symbol in a form we all can recognize (a father) to stand for something else – God, who is formless. The grammatical term for doing this is a metaphor.
Metaphor: ‘A thing regarded as representative or symbolic of something else, especially something abstract’
A metaphor is a figure of speech whose use in our case, is necessitated by the abstract nature of God and His Creation. In A Course In Miracles, God’s Creation is called His Son or Christ. It is very helpful to us as students of this course, to keep in mind that these terms ( God, God’s Son, Christ, God’s Creation) are all symbols that stand for That which is formless, changeless, limitless, perfect, infinite and eternal. All of those six terms are abstract and therefore essentially meaningless to us because we can’t ‘picture’ them.
I suspect that at least some of you must be wondering…if God’s Creation is formless, what about me!? No need to worry. God’s got you covered. The most oft-repeated phrase in the Course is:
“I am not a body. I am free. For I am still as God created me.” W-pI.rVI.In.3:3-5
Without going into a lengthy explanation, the take away is that we are all perfectly safe in Heaven, but dreaming we are a body in a threatening world.
A Course In Miracles’ purpose is to teach us to use our dreaming to wake up – rather than stay asleep where we dream we are vulnerable.