Blog Introduction and Resources

We each have a quiet center at the core of our being. Living in the world provides a multitude of opportunities to distract us from this. Instead of personal peace, we experience stress, turmoil, and suffering of all kinds. These experiences are not necessary ones. It is possible to live in the world and transcend suffering. What this requires is understanding and connecting with the enormous power of the mind. The mind training program reflected in this blog comes primarily from A Course in Miracles (ACIM or the Course). This powerful teaching aims to remove the barriers to accessing the quiet center. In this blog, I share ideas and practices from A Course in Miracles with the goal of promoting the experience of personal peace.

An added benefit to residing in the quiet center is experiencing more love. A Course in Miracles talks a great deal about both peace and love. What it first mentions, though, is love:

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 (Text, Introduction, 1).

While I believe these words and trust that the training program of the Course eventually leads to the experience of love and of nothing else, I have noticed that there is a great deal of confusion evoked by the word “love.” In contrast, “peace” seems much more intuitively clear and has fewer questions surrounding it. For example, few spend time wondering whether or not they are experiencing peace. Because peace has so much immediate appeal, I focus on the quiet center in this blog, but some posts are about love, since that is what we are in truth.

The ideas in A Course in Miracles at times ring Hindu, at other times ring Buddhist, and at yet other times ring Christian. Most of the time, though, they don’t ring quite like anything else at all. They are so radical, so awe-inspiring, and so transformative that it seems clear to me that they come from outside the world of space and time. And yet, A Course in Miracles is a practical program for living in the world. Its principles and guidance help make meaning of day-to-day experiences, converting them one by one into opportunities for learning to be peaceful no matter what is happening. Go to blog

Resources

A Course in Miracles was scribed in short-hand by Dr. Helen Schucman in the late 1960s and early 1970s. She described receiving the words of the Course as a ‘rapid inner dictation.’ Being a scientist, she found the experience initially very unwelcome. Her friend and close colleague, Dr. William Thetford, provided much-needed encouragement to Dr. Shucman to continue scribing the information, which he typed up daily when she read him the words she had taken down in short-hand. Together they edited the manuscript and were later joined in this task by Dr. Kenneth Wapnick.

The “scribe-approved” publisher of A Course in Miracles is The Foundation for Inner Peace. The entire Course (Text, Workbook, and Teacher’s Manual), along with the two pamphlets scribed later, Psychotherapy and Song of Prayer, are available on the Foundation website, ACIM.org. All quotations of A Course in Miracles in this blog are found in the version of the Course published by the Foundation for Inner Peace.

A Course in Miracles is a self-study program. All students of the Course are also teachers, whether or not they actually talk about A Course in Miracles. This is because all minds are joined, which means that as any one person practices the principles of the Course, everyone is learning them too at some level. (This is of course true for any religious or spiritual practice: “Every loving thought held in any part of the Sonship [i.e., the universal mind] belongs to every part” (T-5.IV.3).) Nonetheless, there are teachers of the Course in the traditional sense. I mention a few of them here for those interested in learning more about A Course in Miracles from Course scholars. 

I was introduced to A Course in Miracles through Gary Renard’s book, The Disappearance of the Universe, which I highly recommend. Without The Disappearance of the Universe, I am certain that I would have found the Course so difficult to grasp that I don’t think I would have read more than a few pages. Gary has written several other books as well, including a particularly delightful one, The Lifetimes When Jesus and Buddha Knew Each Other. Gary and Cindy Lora Renard now teach a bi-monthly video class on A Course in Miracles. For more information, visit Gary Renard’s website, GaryRenard.com, and Cindy Lora Renard’s website, CindyLora.com. 

The Foundation for Inner Peace offers many free recordings of webinars on Course themes (ACIM.org). Several of these webinars feature Judith Skutch Whitson, who co-f0unded the Foundation and who passed away on October 19th, 2021. She was one of the first students of the Course and she was very close to the co-scribes, Helen and Bill, as well as to Ken Wapnick. She was a wonderful teacher whose warmth and kindness shines through the recordings of her.

The greatest teacher of A Course in Miracles was Dr. Kenneth Wapnick. He met Drs. Shucman and Thetford just as they were preparing to publish A Course in Miracles and when they showed it to him, he immediately recognized the teaching as one he wanted to devote his life to. He worked closely with Dr. Shucman on the final edit of the book. Ken Wapnick studied and taught A Course in Miracles for several decades until he passed away, in 2013. He left an enormous body of teachings in the form of talks and workshops, articles, and books. They can be found on the Foundation for A Course in Miracles website, FACIM.org. There are also hundreds of short (5-10 minutes) YouTube clips of Ken talking about different ideas from the Course and applying them to common life situations.