A Course in Miracles was written through a process of inner dictation, given to an atheist psychologist in the 1960s. Helen Schucman, after a powerful series of spiritual visions and experiences, began to hear a voice asking her to take notes. She was afraid and believed she may be developing psychosis, but she confided in a dear friend and colleague Bill Thetford.
Bill encouraged Helen to write the material down and assured her they’d look at it together, and if it was nonsense they would burn it and not tell anyone. He gave her the courage to begin writing what they soon discovered to be a masterpiece of spiritual/psychological/philosophical teaching. Over the next seven years Helen would listen to the voice and take it down in shorthand, which she would then read to Bill who would type it up. The voice would stop when she was busy, and start again at the same place when she was next free.
Helen and Bill were working in a very conflictual environment and not long before the beginning of writing down A Course in Miracles, Bill had said to Helen, in desperation, ‘there must be a better way’. Helen had given him her commitment to the cause, apparently responding with ‘I’m going to help you find it’. This duo were clearly genuinely asking for help beyond the limited nature of their own human minds, because what was given through their decision to find a path out of conflict is an authentic spiritual text, containing the power to remove suffering from any mind that approaches it with an openness and a sincere need for healing. Kenneth Wapnick helped Helen edit and organise the material and it was then published by the Foundation for Inner Peace in 1976.
Many are writing about profound spiritual experiences. Many are teaching what they have been given and offering the truth as they have experienced it. But no one has so far presented a complete, comprehensive manual to guide the human mind into a process of awakening and onward to discover its inherently precious, infinitely beautiful identity beyond limitation, beyond suffering and pain, in the wholeness and sanctity of the here and now. The gifts of this “journey without distance in the space of an instant of reality” are the eternally evolving, ever-expanding breadths and depths of wholeness, what could be expressed as an ever-deepening exploration of, and relationship with, the mind of God.
The Course uses Christian vernacular, and it wasn’t far into the writing that the author identified himself as Jesus Christ. Throughout the Course Jesus puts right much of the misinformation that has been presented as his teachings over the last 2000 years. He quotes from the Bible and explains his intended meaning of the words. He expresses, or at least strongly implies, his derision at his teachings being used to perpetrate guilt, promote separation and justify conflict, and cements the assertion taught through many Gnostic texts that his original message was one of purity, selfless giving, wholeness, peace, love, and attaining enlightenment through the ever-present timeless instant of the here and now.
The God of A Course in Miracles, who Jesus experiences and teaches as his Father, his Creator, and his Whole Self, did not make a world of seemingly infinite suffering and pain. Time and space and form is simply a misunderstanding; the projection of a mind that has made a bad decision and is now living in the consequences of that decision, and learning to decide to make a different choice. God is simply the nature of all things beyond space, time and form. ‘He’ is the energy within matter, the vibration within the form, inseparable from that which is experiencing the incredible beauty, wholeness and perfection of itself. God is love, as are you. God simply is, as you simply are.
Neither heaven or hell exist outside of the mind that experiences them. Hell is simply the timeline from birth to death, the Buddhist’s wheel of samsara, the experience of being a human being, with all the trials and tribulations it entails, and the certainty of death hanging over you at the end! And heaven is the enlightened perspective, a frequency of thought that doesn’t perceive time, space, form, suffering or death, but simply extends continuously as a flow of energy from it’s Source. God is an experience of the infinite depths of the here and now, the expansive mind that explores itself through its own extension forever. This whole self is the love you have always been looking for, the love that makes you whole.
The present moment, which, as you enter into it and discover your true identity there, is in fact the only time that exists. Heaven is a timeless instant, where eternity can be found, experienced and loved. It is not somewhere you will reach when you die, death doesn’t change a thing. You will find yourself in space, time and form until the lessons have been learned that bring your mind into a frequency of thought where you are truly teaching the love that you are, at which point you will simply leave, never to return! Maybe you will drift back in and out of form for a while, so that you can offer the certainty you have found. But the seemingly elusive experience of being vibration rather than form, energy rather than matter, will be your constant friend; and all healing – physical, mental and emotional – will be discovered and offered to all through this grounded understanding of gentle bliss.
Thank you, dearest ‘older brother’ Jesus! Thank you for your commitment to our enlightened understanding, and your patience, which seems truly infinite in its scope. Thank you for giving us a roadmap out of suffering, and for being with us every step of the way home.
Holly Rose Thomas 