A Course In Miracles Revisited
If you have spent enough time exploring spirituality, you have probably heard about An application in Miracles. Maybe you have even “done” it. And endless choice of spiritual seekers-New Age, Christian, Buddhist-have see the Course or at least contain it sitting on their bookshelf. It has become a familiar the main landscape.
And yet that familiarity masks what a unique and unusual document An application in Miracles is. The Course falls into the family of channeled material, yet most such material generally seems to ride the ocean of popular currents of thought, telling us more or less what we expect you'll hear: “You are God. inch “You create your own reality. inch “You can have it all. inch
While the Course echoes countless themes from the world's spiritual traditions and from modern mindsets, what is perhaps most striking about it is how original it is. Just when you think that you know what it is going to say, it heads off in some completely unfamiliar direction, one that has no parallel in a other teaching, ancient or modern.
Therefore, if you want to hear the old familiar facts, An application in Miracles is not for you. On every page, it is trying to overturn the taken-for-granted assumptions on which your world is created.
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 are better than others, and that trying to make others worse than you is an attack. It says, “Specialness is succeed, and its glory is [another's] defeat and shame. inch Trying to defeat and shame another, it says, just leaves you burdened with guiltiness.
Similarly, all of us try to fashion a confident image of ourselves, by implementing 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 rather than our true identity, which no image can capture a course in miracles: “You have no image to be perceived. inch The Course claims that we don't require a finished image or special attributes, for underneath these shallow things lies a historical identity that is equivalent to everyone else's yet has boundless worth.
Finally, we all assume that if there is a God, the world was 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 consentrate He made a new where may be appear to have reality. He is not crazy. Yet only madness makes a new like this. inch
Have you ever alleged 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 dealing with this bad news that it delivers its good news.