What would it be like if miracles were ordinary, while what was unusual was pain, sickness, heartbreak, anxiety, misfortune, and death?

It wouldn’t be Earth, that’s for sure.

Or would it?

“Nothing real can be threatened. Nothing unreal exists.”

What really is the natural way of things? Is it the endless dialectic of life and death, light and dark, joy and pain? Is reality really a ride on the train of time along the cosmic tracks of yin and yang?

Are all our notions half-false or half-likely — depending on which direction the pendulum of truth swings at the moment?

Somebody (Martin Buber?) said “all truth yearns toward the infinite.”

Can infinity have an opposite?

There is a personal story here. I have always found it interesting that science has a few tenets that don’t allow for opposites, though we treat them as though the opposites were real.

Heat is an example. Heat is a property of molecular action. Molecules are never still. Therefore there are degrees of heat, but not of its absence, which we call “cold.”

Light is another. It has no opposite either. What we call dark doesn’t really exist, except in our minds.

Light has always been a metaphor for God. We speak of “enlightenment.” (Who ever heard of “endarkenment”?) It applies as well to Truth. (“I saw the light.”) Dying persons and others who experience altered states of consciousness report “seeing light” and identify it as whatever deity or encompassing cosmic construct pleases them.

It is my curiosity about these “matters” that draws me to A Course in Miracles. Although I found its Christian terminology off-putting at first, the message on which it rides has slowly and steadily changed the way I see the world. I don’t feel like a different person. The topography of my personality is pretty much unchanged. The differences in the way I behave are probably too small for most people to notice. Only recently I discovered that a 25-year-hangnail-chewing habit had ended months before and that my aspirin consumption dropped from a bottle a month to zero. Something very subtle and powerful is working in my mind. Like Castaneda learning the Yaqui sorcerer’s ways from Don Juan, I am acquiring a new way of seeing the world.

This is what A Course in Miracles teaches. While other enlightenments cover one facet or another of behavior or conviction, the Course is a complete do-it-yourself guide. After seven months with it, I can tell you this much from my personal experience: it works, and it doesn’t interfere with whatever else it is I should be doing.

A Course in Miracles did not come into the world by ordinary means. It was written, over the span of ten years, by an academic psychologist at a prestigious northeast university. The writer, who prefers to be identified only as Dr. H, does not claim to be the author. She says, rather, that the course was dictated by an inner voice. All she did was take it down. Simple as that. It never interfered with her work. The inner voice could stop and start without any problem. It could stop mid-sentence one moment and start again seconds or months later without a hitch. The main work was completed in 1975. It consists of three hardcover books: a Text (622 pages), a Workbook for Students (478 pages) and a Manual for Teachers (88 pages). They are published by the Foundation for Inner Peace, Huntington Station, New York.

In less than two years, the Course has spread all over the country. There are study groups in 47 states. The Chapel Hill-Durham area is a hotbed of “Miracles” activity. Perhaps several hundred local people are variously involved in the Course. Some are simply doing it on their own while others belong to one or more study groups. There is also at least one local “class,” with a teacher and students. (This is the exception rather than the rule. The course provides little direction for formal teaching, though it does not argue against it. The emphasis is on the self, so for each person the course is self-administered.)

There is a first person voice used in the course. That person appears to be Jesus. This can make it very hard for weary enlightenment-seekers who have grown deeply tired of Christian dogma. But don’t be quick to judge. It’s not what you think. Maybe nothing is.

To explain the Course is usually a futile exercise. I don’t think it was meant to be explained. So what follows are a series of quotes, taken from various places in each of the three books. The Course is a very tightly-woven fabric of interdependent concepts and teachings. Every sentence is interrelated. So what you read is somewhat out of context. All you need to compensate for this is an open heart and an open mind. Truth isn’t relative. It lives quite well without contexts.

Introduction

This is a course in miracles. It is a required course. Only the time you take it is voluntary. Free will does not mean that you can establish the curriculum. It means only that you can elect what you want to take at a given time. The course does not aim at teaching the meaning of love, for that is beyond what can be taught. It does aim, however, at removing the blocks to the awareness of love’s presence, which is your natural inheritance. The opposite of love is fear, but what is all-encompassing can have no opposite.

This course can therefore be summed up very simply this way:

Nothing real can be threatened.

Nothing unreal exists.

Herein lies the peace of God.

Principles Of Miracles

There is no order of difficulty in miracles. One is not “harder” or “bigger” than another. They are all the same. All expressions of love are maximal.

Miracles as such do not matter. The only thing that matters is their Source, which is far beyond evaluation.

Miracles occur naturally as expressions of love. The real miracle is the love that inspires them. In this sense everything that comes from love is a miracle.

Miracles are habits, and should be involuntary. They should not be under conscious control. Consciously selected miracles can be misguided.

Miracles are natural. When they do not occur something has gone wrong.

Miracles are a kind of exchange. Like all expressions of love, which are always miraculous in the true sense, the exchange reverses the physical laws. They bring more love both to the giver and the receiver.

The use of miracles as spectacles to induce belief is a misunderstanding of their purpose.

Miracles are thoughts. Thoughts can represent the lower or bodily level of experience, or the higher or spiritual level of experience. One makes the physical, and the other creates the spiritual.

Each day should be devoted to miracles. The purpose of time is to enable you to learn how to use time constructively. It is thus a teaching device and a means to an end. Time will cease when it is no longer useful in facilitating learning.

Miracles transcend the body. They are sudden shifts into invisibility, away from the bodily level. This is why they heal.

Miracles are associated with fear only because of the belief that darkness can hide. You believe that what your physical eyes cannot see does not exist. This leads to a denial of spiritual sight.

Miracles are part of an interlocking chain of forgiveness which, when completed, is the Atonement. Atonement works all the time and in all the dimensions of time.

Miracles enable you to heal the sick and raise the dead because you made sickness and death yourself, and can therefore abolish both. You are a miracle, capable of creating in the likeness of your Creator. Everything else is your own nightmare, and does not exist. Only the creations of light are real.

Miracles represent freedom from fear. “Atoning” means “undoing.” The undoing of fear is an essential part of the Atonement value of miracles.

By recognizing spirit, miracles adjust the levels of perception and show them in proper alignment. This places spirit at the center, where it can communicate directly.

More About Miracles . . .

Miracles arise from a mind that is ready for them.

The miracle is much like the body in that both are learning aids for facilitating a state in which they become unnecessary. When spirit’s original state of direct communication is reached, neither the body nor the miracle serves any purpose. While you believe you are in a body, however, you can choose between loveless and miraculous means of expression.

Before miracle workers are ready to undertake their function in the world, it is essential that they fully understand their fear of release. Otherwise they may unwittingly foster the belief that release is imprisonment, a belief that is already very prevalent.

If you are afraid to use the mind to heal, you should not attempt to do so. The very fact that you are afraid makes your mind vulnerable to miscreation . . . Under these conditions, it is safer for you to rely temporarily on physical healing devices, because you cannot misperceive them as your own creations.

Revelation

Revelation induces complete but temporary suspension of doubt and fear. It reflects the original form of communication between God and His creations, involving the extremely personal sense of creation sometimes sought in physical relationships. Physical closeness cannot achieve it. Miracles, however, are genuinely interpersonal, and result in true closeness to others. Revelation unites you directly with God. Miracles unite you with your brother. Neither emanates from consciousness, but both are experienced there. Consciousness is the state that induces action, though it does not inspire it. You are free to believe what you choose, and what you do attests to what you believe.

Needs, Love And Fear

While lack does not exist in the creation of God, it is very apparent in what you have made. It is, in fact, the essential difference between them. . . . Until the “separation,” which is the meaning of the “fall” . . . there were no needs at all.

A sense of separation from God is the only lack you really need correct. This sense of separation would never have arisen if you had not distorted your perception of truth, and had thus perceived yourself as lacking.

The idea of orders of need follows from the original error that one can be separated from God.

The real purpose of this world is to use it to correct your unbelief. You can never control the effects of fear yourself because you made fear and you believe in what you made. Belief produces the acceptance of existence. That is why you can believe what no one else thinks is true. It is true for you because it was made by you.

All aspects of fear are untrue because they do not exist at the creative level, and therefore do not exist at all. To whatever extent you are willing to submit your beliefs to this test, to that extent are your perceptions corrected. In sorting out the false from the true, the miracle proceeds along these lines:

Perfect love casts out fear.
If fear exists,
Then there is not perfect love.
                                                      But,
Only perfect love exists.
If there is fear,
It produces a state that does not exist.
Spirit

Spirit in its knowledge is unaware of the ego. It does not attack it; it merely cannot conceive of it at all.

Spirit is the thought of God, which he created like himself.

To spirit getting is meaningless and giving is all. Having everything, spirit holds everything by giving it, and this creates as the Father created. While this kind of thinking is totally alien to having things, even to the lower mind this is quite comprehensible in connection with ideas. If you share a physical possession, you divide its ownership. If you share an idea, however, you do not lessen it. All of it is still yours although all of it has been given away. Further, if the one to whom you give it accepts it as his, he reinforces it in your mind and increases it. If you can accept the concept that the world is one of ideas, the whole belief in the false association which the ego makes between giving and losing is gone.

Anger And Attack

Anger cannot occur unless you believe that you have been attacked, that your attack is justified in return, and that you are in no way responsible for it. You cannot be attacked. Attack has no justification and you are responsible for what you believe.

Fear

The presence of fear shows that you have raised body thoughts to the level of mind. This is an obvious confusion of levels.

The truth is that you are responsible for what you think, because it is only at this level that you can exercise choice. What you do comes from what you think. Whenever you are afraid, it is a sure sign that you have allowed your mind to miscreate and have not allowed me to guide it.

When you are fearful, you have chosen wrongly. That is why you feel responsible for it. You must change your mind, not your behavior, and this is a matter of willingness. You do not need guidance except at the mind level. Correction belongs only at the level where change is possible. Change does not mean anything at the symptom level, where it cannot work.

Before you choose to do anything, ask me if your choice is in accord with mine. If you are sure that it is, there will be no fear.

As long as you recognize only the need for the remedy, you will remain fearful. However, as soon as you accept the remedy, you have abolished the fear. This is how true healing occurs.

Any attempt to resolve error through attempting the mastery of fear is useless. In fact, it asserts the power of fear by the very assumption that it need be mastered. The true resolution rests entirely on mastery through love.

Power Of Mind

Few appreciate the real power of the mind, and no one remains fully aware of it all the time. The mind is very powerful, and never loses its creative force. It never sleeps. Every instant it is creating. It is hard to recognize that thought and belief combine into a powerful surge that can literally move mountains. It appears at first glance that to believe such power about yourself is arrogant, but that is not the real reason you do not believe it. You prefer to believe that your thoughts cannot exert real influence because you are actually afraid of them. This may allay awareness of the guilt, but at the cost of perceiving the mind as impotent. If you believe that what you think is ineffectual you may cease to be afraid of it, but you are hardly likely to respect it. There are no idle thoughts. All thinking produces form at some level.

Creativity

Since the separation, the words “create” and “make” have become confused. When you make something, you do so out of a specific sense of lack or need. Anything made for a specific purpose has no true generalizability. When you make something to fill a perceived lack, you are tacitly implying that you believe in separation. The ego has invented many ingenious thought systems for this purpose. None of them is creative. Inventiveness is wasted effort even in its most ingenious form. The highly specific nature of invention is not worthy of the abstract creativity of God’s creations.

Is it not strange you believe that to think you made the world you see is arrogance? God made it not. Of this you can be sure. What can He know of the ephemeral, the sinful and the guilty, the afraid, the suffering and the lonely, and the mind that lives within a body that must die? You but accuse him of insanity, to think He made a world where such things seem to have reality.

To think that God made chaos, contradicts His Will, invented opposites to truth, and suffers death to triumph over life; all this is arrogance. Humility would see at once these things are not of Him.

The power of decision is your own. Decide but to accept your rightful place as co-creator of the universe and all you think you made will disappear.

Choice

No one can suffer loss unless it be his own decision. No one suffers pain except his choice elects this state for him. No one can grieve nor fear nor think him sick unless these are the outcomes that he wants. And no one dies without his own consent. Nothing occurs but represents your wish, and nothing is omitted that you choose. Here is your world, complete in all details. Here is its whole reality for you. And it is only here salvation is.

Salvation is the recognition that the truth is true and nothing else is true.

Judgement

The choice to judge rather than to know is the cause of the loss of peace. Judgement is the process on which perception but not knowledge rests.

Judgement always involves rejection.

You have no idea of the tremendous release and deep peace that comes from meeting yourself and your brothers totally without judgement.

You do not need judgement to organize your life, and you certainly do not need it to organize yourself. In the presence of knowledge all judgement is automatically suspended, and it is this process that enables recognition to replace perception.

When you feel tired, it is because you have judged yourself as capable of being tired. When you laugh at someone, it is because you have judged him as unworthy.

The strain of constant judgement is virtually intolerable. It is curious that an ability so debilitating would be so deeply cherished. Yet, if you wish to be the author of reality, you will insist on holding on to judgement. You will also regard judgement with fear, believing someday it will be used against you.

The Body

You can use the body best to help you enlarge your perception so you can achieve real vision, of which the physical eye is incapable. Learning to do this is the body’s only true usefulness.

Perception

The ability to perceive made the body possible, because you must perceive something and with something. That is why perception involves an exchange or translation, which knowledge does not need. The interpretative function of perception, a distorted form of creation, then permits you to interpret the body as yourself in an attempt to escape from the conflict you have induced. Spirit (or Light), which knows, could not be reconciled with this loss of power, because it is incapable of darkness. This makes spirit almost inaccessible to the mind and entirely inaccessible to the body. Thereafter, spirit is perceived as a threat, because light abolishes darkness merely by showing you it is not there. Truth will always overcome error in this way. This cannot be an active process of correction because, as I have already emphasized, knowledge does not do anything. It can be perceived by an attacker, but it cannot attack.

I have said that the abilities you possess are only shadows of your real strength, and that perception, which is inherently judgemental, was introduced only after the separation. No one has been sure of anything since.

Ego

The ego is the questioning part of the post-separation self, which was made rather than created. It is capable of asking questions but not of perceiving meaningful answers.

Consciousness, the level of perception, was the first split introduced into the mind after the separation, making the mind a perceiver rather than a creator. Consciousness is correctly identified as the domain of the ego. The ego is a wrong-minded attempt to perceive yourself as you wish to be, rather than as you are. Yet you can know yourself only as you are, because that is all you can be sure of. Everything else is open to question.

The ego literally lives by comparisons. Equality is beyond its grasp, and charity becomes impossible. The ego never gives out of abundance, because it was made as a substitute for it. That is why the concept of “getting” arose in the ego’s thought system. Body appetites are not physical in origin. The ego regards the body as its home and tries to satisfy itself through the body. But the idea that this is possible is a decision of the mind, which has become completely confused about what is really possible.

The ego believes it is completely on its own, which is merely another way of describing how it thinks it originated. This is such a fearful state that it can only turn to other egos and try to unite with them in a feeble attempt at identification, or attack them in an equally feeble show of strength.

Forgiveness

Forgiveness is the healing of the perception of separation. Correct perception of your brother is necessary, because minds have chosen to see themselves as separate.

Forgiveness is easily misunderstood as something that entails an unfair sacrifice of righteous wrath, a gift unjustified and undeserved and a complete denial of the truth. This twisted view is easily corrected when you can accept the fact that pardon is not asked for what is true. It must be limited to what is false. It is irrelevant to everything except illusions.

Because you think your sins are real, you look on pardon as deception. For it is impossible to think of sin as true and not believe forgiveness is a lie.

It is sin’s unreality that makes forgiveness natural and wholly sane, a deep relief to those who offer it; a quiet blessing where it is received. It does not countenance illusions.

Forgiveness is the only thing that stands for truth in the illusions of the world. It sees their nothingness, and looks straight through the thousand forms in which they may appear.

Forgiveness, then, is an illusion, but because of its purpose it has one difference. Unlike all other illusions it leads away from error and not towards it.

Forgiveness might be called a kind of happy fiction; a way in which the unknowing can bridge the gap between their perception and knowledge because they do not think it is their will to do so.

Remember this: only my condemnation injures me. Only forgiveness sets me free.

Forgiveness recognizes that what you thought your brother did to you did not occur. It does not pardon sins and make them real. It sees there was no sin.

Teaching

The role of teaching and learning is actually reversed in the thinking of the world. To teach is to learn. The teacher and the learner are the same.

Teaching is a constant process; it goes on every minute of the day and continues into sleeping thoughts as well.

To teach is to demonstrate. There are only two thought systems, and you demonstrate that you believe one or the other is true all the time. From your demonstration others learn, and so do you.

The question is not whether you will teach, for in that there is no choice.

A teacher of God is anyone who chooses to be one.

Defense

You operate from the belief you must protect yourself from what is happening because it must contain what threatens you. A sense of threat is acknowledgement of an inherent weakness; a belief that there is danger which has power to call on you to make appropriate defense. The world is based on this insane belief. And all its structures, all its thoughts and doubts, its penalties and heavy armaments, its legal definitions and its codes, its ethics and its leaders and its gods, all serve but to preserve its sense of threat. For no one walks the world in armature but must have terror striking at his heart.

Defense is frightening. It stems from fear, increasing fear as each defense is made. You think it offers safety. Yet it speaks of fear made real and terror justified. Is it not strange you do not pause to ask, as you elaborate your plans and make your armor thicker and your locks more tight, what you defend, and how, and against what?

The body has no need for defense. This cannot be too often emphasized. It will be strong and healthy if the mind does not abuse it by assigning it to roles it cannot fill.

The “self” that needs protection is not real.

Defend the body and you have attacked your mind.

Sickness

No one can heal unless he understands what purpose sickness seems to serve. For then he understands as well its purpose has no meaning.

Being causeless and without a meaningful intent of any kind, it cannot be at all. When this is seen, healing is automatic. It dispels this meaningless illusion by the same approach that carries all of them to truth, and merely leaves them there to disappear.

Sickness is not an accident. Like all defenses, it is an insane device for self-deception. And like all the rest, its purpose is to hide reality, attack it, change it, render it inept, distort it, twist it or reduce it to a little pile of unassembled parts. The aim of all defenses is to keep the truth from being whole.

Sickness is a decision. It is not a thing that happens to you, quite unsought, which makes you weak and brings you suffering. It is a choice you make, a plan you lay. When you are sick, you think the truth may go away and threaten your establishments no more.

Jesus — Christ

Helpers are given to you in many forms, although they are one. But they have names which differ for a time, for time needs symbols, being itself unreal. Their names are legion, but we will not go beyond the names the course itself employs.

 

The name of Jesus is the name of one who was a man but saw the face of Christ in all his brothers and remembered God. So he became identified with Christ, a man no longer, but at one with God. The man was an illusion, for he seemed to be a separate being, walking by himself, within a body that appeared to hold his self from Self, as all illusions do. Jesus remains a Savior because he saw the false without accepting it as true. And Christ needed his form that He might appear to men and save them from their own illusions.

In his complete identification with the Christ — the perfect Son of God, His one creation and His happiness, forever like Himself and one with Him — Jesus became what all of us must be. He offered us a final demonstration that it is impossible to kill God’s Son; nor can his life in any way be changed by sin and evil, malice, fear or death.

Is he the Christ? O yes, along with you.

Is he God’s only Helper? No, indeed. For Christ takes many forms with different names until their oneness can be recognized.

Larger Considerations

A universal theology is impossible, but a universal experience is not only possible but necessary. It is this experience toward which the course is directed.

This is a manual for a special curriculum, intended for teachers of a special form of the universal course. There are many thousands of other forms, all with the same outcome.

God

God’s will is all there is.

You cannot understand how much your Father loves you, for there is no parallel in your experience of the world to help you understand it.

At the time of this writing, all 5,000 copies of the first printing are distributed. New ones should be available soon. For information write me, care of The Sun, Box 732, Chapel Hill, N.C. Or call the Psychical Research Foundation in Durham (2015 Erwin Road, 286-0714) where, on Wednesday, Sept. 14, at 7:30 p.m., there will be an introductory lecture on the course.

A Course in Miracles is copyrighted by The Foundation for Inner Peace.