A Course In Miracles Revisited
If you have spent long exploring spirituality, you have probably heard about A program in Miracles. Maybe you have even “done” it. A huge number of spiritual seekers-New Age, Christian, Buddhist-have investigate Course or at least own it sitting on their bookshelf. It has become a familiar area of the landscape.
And yet that familiarity masks what a unique and unconventional document A program in Miracles is. The Course falls into the sounding channeled material, yet most such material may seem to ride the lake of popular currents of thought, telling us more or less what we be ready to hear: “You are God. inches “You create your own reality. inches “You can have it all. inches
While the Course echoes countless themes from the world’s spiritual traditions and from modern psychology, what is perhaps most striking about it is how original it is acim bookstore. Just when you think that you know what it is going to say, it heads off in some completely unfamiliar direction, one that have no parallel in different other teaching, ancient or modern.
Therefore, if you want to hear the old familiar realities, A program in Miracles is not for you. On every page, it is trying to overturn the taken-for-granted assumptions on which your world is built.
For instance, all of us naturally want to distinguish ourselves through noted achievement, ability, and recognition. We all want to be special. Yet the Course points out that you can only be special when you’re better than others, and that trying to make others worse than you is an attack. It says, “Specialness is success, and its success is [another’s] defeat and shame. inches Trying to defeat and shame another, it says, just leaves you burdened with remorse.
Similarly, all of us try to fashion having a positive image of ourselves, by taking on pleasing appearances and responsible behavior. Yet the Course says that this image we have so carefully crafted is really an idol, a false god that we worship in preference to our true identity, which no image can capture: “You have no image to be perceived. inches The Course claims that we don’t desire a rubbed image or special attributes, for underneath these ” light ” things lies an ancient identity that matches everyone else’s yet has assets worth.
Finally, we all assume that if there is a God, the world is made by Him. Yet the Course reminds us of what we all know, that the world is a place of suffering, disease, war, and death. Then it says, “You but accuse Him of insanity, to reflect He made some sort of where might be found manage to have reality. He is not insane. Yet only madness makes some sort of like this. inches
If you’ve ever believed that there is something deeply wrong with the world, that there is an insanity that has seeped into everything, including perhaps your own heart, then the Course might be for you. For it is accompanied by this bad news that it delivers its good news.
It promises, “There is a way of living in the world that is not here, although it seems to be. inches In this way, the distressing appearances of life no longer govern our state of mind, nor influence our a reaction to others. We can find “quiet even accompanied by the turmoil” of the world. We can respond with open-handed generosity, even when others try to hurt us. We can release the past even when its residue lies all around us. We can walk through our day with “no cares about you and no concerns… no fear of future and no past regrets” even if we have failed to manifest living individuals dreams.
How do we reach this unshakable peace? We get down to business and start teaching our minds. We practice seeing things differently. In this process, the Course provides abundant help. It includes hundreds of exercises aimed at shifting us into a new perception-exercises in forgiveness, entering the present, seeing ourselves differently, and experiencing God.
Yes, the process takes effort (how did effort become so unpopular? ). And yes, it promises to turn our inner world upside down. Yet perhaps we have grown tired of our inner world, maybe even a bit fed up with it. Perhaps we have noticed that as mercurial as it is, it is remarkably resistant to real change. Perhaps, then, we are ready to try something new, or take something off the corner that we only thought was familiar. Perhaps A program in Miracles is the thing we have been looking for.
