When you have spent much time exploring spirituality, you have probably heard about A Course in Miracles.Maybe you've even "done" it. And endless choice of spiritual seekers-New Age, Christian, Buddhist-have read the Course or at the very least contain it sitting on the bookshelf. It has become a familiar part of the landscape.
And yet that familiarity masks what a unique and unconventional document a class in miracles is. The Course falls to the sounding channeled material, yet most such material generally seems to ride the waves of popular currents of thought, telling us pretty much what we expect to listen to: "You are God." "You create your personal reality." "You could have it all."
While the Course echoes countless themes from the world's spiritual traditions and from modern psychology, what's perhaps most striking about it is how original it is. Just once you believe that do you know what it will say, it heads off in a few completely unfamiliar direction, one that seems to have no parallel in some other teaching, ancient or modern.
Therefore, if you intend to hear the old familiar truths, A Course in Miracles is not for you. On every page, it is wanting to overturn the taken-for-granted assumptions where your world is built.
For example, most of us naturally desire to distinguish ourselves through noted achievement, ability, and recognition. All of us desire to be special. The Course points out that you can only be special by being better than others, and that trying to produce others worse than you is an attack.It says, "Specialness is triumph, and its victory is [another's] defeat and shame." Wanting to defeat and shame another, it says, just leaves you burdened with guilt.
Similarly, most of us try to fashion a positive image of ourselves, by adopting pleasing appearances and responsible behavior. The Course says that image we've so carefully crafted is actually an idol, a false god that people worship in place of our true identity, which no image can capture: "You've no image to be perceived." The Course claims that people don't need a slick image or special attributes, for underneath these superficial things lies an old identity that is the same as everyone else's yet has infinite worth.
Finally, all of us assume that if you have a God, the entire world was created by Him. The Course reminds us of what all of us know, that the entire world is really a place of suffering, disease, war, and death. Then it says, "You but accuse Him of insanity, to think He made a global where such things seem to have reality. He is not mad. Yet only madness makes a global like this."
When you have ever suspected that there is something deeply wrong with the entire world, that there is an insanity that's seeped into everything, including perhaps your personal heart, then the Course might be for you. For it is in the midst with this bad news so it delivers its good news.
It promises, "There's a way of living on the planet that is not here, although it generally seems to be." In this way, the distressing appearances of life no more govern our state of mind, nor dictate our a reaction to others. We can find "quiet even in the midst of the turmoil" of the world. We can respond with open-handed generosity, even though others try to hurt us. We can forget about days gone by even though its residue lies all around us. We can walk through our day with "no cares and no concerns...no concern with future and no past regrets" even though we've didn't manifest the life of our dreams.
Comments