ACIM: A Course in Miracles
Classics of spiritual misdirection #6
Sceptical spirituality
Classics of spiritual misdirection #6
Introductory remarks:
If any of the books in this series are essential to your life, and if you love them and depend on them, then please don’t read what follows. It’s not for you. Honestly — stay away ! My intention is not to hurt the feelings of devotees and believers. These articles are directed solely at those who, having read the texts in question, suspect that the author may be propagating an illusion.
Important disclaimer:
The angle from which we are approaching examples in this series is very unusual in the sense that we have not the slightest interest in scandal, hypocrisy, criminality, alcoholism, sexual misconduct or any of the rest of the supposed ‘sins’ to which religious teachers regularly succumb (just read the news, or follow some of the more investigative posters to Medium, like Matthew Remski). We are interested solely in the validity or otherwise of the spiritual teachings proposed; all the rest is irrelevant. In other words, we don’t care if the spiritual ‘teacher’ in question is the worst human being on earth, a predatory paedophile, a BTK serial killer and a member of Daesh, provided their teaching does what it claims to do, that is, illumine your metaphysical being such that you can usefully and meaningfully explore it for yourself.
‘A Course in Miracles’ (ACIM) is a somewhat unusual neo-Christian mystical teaching, anchored in vast amounts of textual exegesis, and supplemented by videos and tapes and lectures and everything else. It likes to present itself as substantially impressive. Yet like any and every New Age spiritual fantasy, it falls to pieces as soon as you ask any questions.
How best to approach this teaching?
We can begin with a casual sketch of the work as a whole, not pretending to be anything like a serious systematic analysis in itself, but merely as a point of orientation, so that someone following our line of thought can have some idea as to how we respond to the publication as a crafted proposition.
The copy we have of the ‘Text, Workbook for Students and Manual for Teachers’ (California, c1992) is vaguely biblical in appearance: navy-blue cover, gold lettering on the cover and the pages printed on thin bible-type paper. There are some 1200 pages inside; and the text is reasonably dense, so an immense amount of reading required to get through it all. It has been laid out as if carefully thought through, and so presumably designed to be treated as a systematic exposition — one explanation following another in a logical sequence.
But this is where the fun begins. As soon as one starts to try to get a feel for what to expect, the prompts one is likely to stumble across are, to say the least, unexpected. It’s been published by the ‘Foundation for Inner Peace’ which, in New Age terms, appears to press the right button, but then on reflection seems slightly underwhelming — is this all the miracles are about? That is to say, ‘inner peace’? Presumably yes. And the end pages have advertisements for other books, videos and audiotapes which promise to go into even greater detail on all aspects of the teaching.
Keywords — of the kind that jump off the page — include God, Jesus, Redemption, Atonement, Love, Psychotherapy, Kingdom, Sin, and so on, so we would seem to be in the realm of some kind of neo-Christian offshoot– something along the lines, perhaps, of Mormonism or Scientology. ACIM is most definitely piggybacking on Christianity, but then most New Age teachings are relying on some prior doctrine or the other for their foundation.
The text itself is apparently the result of ‘channelling’ — meaning that it is the direct transcription of words, thoughts and ideas transmitted from a spirit in the ‘great beyond’ to a suitably accommodating vehicle on our side of the curtain. ‘Channelling’ — as a form of divine revelation — sounds less deranged than ‘spirit possession’ or ‘speaking in tongues’, and perhaps less generally alarming as well.
Of course none of this has the least to do with the substance of the teaching itself, and we include it only to situate it within the spectrum of New Age spirituality.
So where to begin?
ACIM tries to establish itself through a kind of pseudo-substantiality. It tries to look like a serious work, but in fact most of it consists of nothing more than an unending series of declarations, heavily loaded with neo-Christian concepts and trigger words, and relying for its cogency on a very popular form of supposedly meaningful circular reasoning: this is true because God (or whatever) has already told us it is.
And as is often the case with supposedly spiritual texts, anything and everything of value can be found in the preface or the introduction, and all that follows thereafter tends to be only padding. The early pages invariably give the game away, and ACIM is no exception.
Though apparently in the case of this second edition the very useful preface was written some time after the initial ‘dictation’:
This Preface was written in 1977, in response to many requests for a brief introduction to A Course in Miracles. The first two parts — How It Came; What It Is — Helen Schucman wrote herself; the final part — What It Says — was written by the process of inner dictation described in the Preface. (p.vii)
So we can go straight to the section ‘What it Says’ for a summary of the teaching:
Nothing real can be threatened.
Nothing unreal exists.
Herein lies the peace of God.
This is how A Course in Miracles begins. It makes a fundamental distinction between the real and the unreal; between knowledge and perception. Knowledge is truth, under one law, the law of love or God. Truth is unalterable, eternal and unambiguous. It can be unrecognized, but it cannot be changed. It applies to everything that God created, and only what He created is real. It is beyond learning because it is beyond time and process. It has no opposite; no beginning and no end. It merely is.
The world of perception, on the other hand, is the world of time, of change, of beginnings and endings. It is based on interpretation, not on facts. It is the world of birth and death, founded on the belief in scarcity, loss, separation and death. It is learned rather than given, selective in its perceptual emphases, unstable in its functioning, and inaccurate in its interpretations.
From knowledge and perception respectively, two distinct thought systems arise which are opposite in every respect. In the realm of knowledge no thoughts exist apart from God, because God and His Creation share one Will. The world of perception, however, is made by the belief in opposites and separate wills, in perpetual conflict with each other and with God. What perception sees and hears appears to be real because it permits into awareness only what conforms to the wishes of the perceiver. This leads to a world of illusions, a world which needs constant defense precisely because it is not real.
When you have been caught in the world of perception you are caught in a dream. You cannot escape without help, because everything your senses show merely witnesses to the reality of the dream. God has provided the Answer, the only Way out, the true Helper. It is the function of His Voice, His Holy Spirit, to mediate between the two worlds. He can do this because, while on the one hand He knows the truth, on the other He also recognizes our illusions, but without believing in them. It is the Holy Spirit’s goal to help us escape from the dream world by teaching us how to reverse our thinking and unlearn our mistakes. Forgiveness is the Holy Spirit’s great learning aid in bringing this thought reversal about. However, the Course has its own definition of what forgiveness really is just as it defines the world in its own way.
The world we see merely reflects our own internal frame of reference — the dominant ideas, wishes and emotions in our minds. “Projection makes perception” (Text, p. 445). We look inside first, decide the kind of world we want to see and then project that world outside, making it the truth as we see it. We make it true by our interpretations of what it is we are seeing. If we are using perception to justify our own mistakes — our anger, our impulses to attack, our lack of love in whatever form it may take — we will see a world of evil, destruction, malice, envy and despair. All this we must learn to forgive, not because we are being “good” and “charitable,” but because what we are seeing is not true. We have distorted the world by our twisted defenses, and are therefore seeing what is not there. As we learn to recognize our perceptual errors, we also learn to look past them or “forgive.” At the same time we are forgiving ourselves, looking past our distorted self-concepts to the Self that God created in us and as us.
Sin is defined as “lack of love” (Text, p. 11). Since love is all there is, sin in the sight of the Holy Spirit is a mistake to be corrected, rather than an evil to be punished. Our sense of inadequacy, weakness and incompletion comes from the strong investment in the “scarcity principle” that governs the whole world of illusions. From that point of view, we seek in others what we feel is wanting in ourselves. We “love” another in order to get something ourselves. That, in fact, is what passes for love in the dream world. There can be no greater mistake than that, for love is incapable of asking for anything. (pp.x-xi)
And so on.
We have quoted a large chunk of text here because the essential teaching itself is quite hard to pin down in any easy and straightforward formulation. And in those instances where ACIM summarises itself, it really doesn’t make much sense; it always manages to look as though some important element is missing, or obscured. See for example the very peculiar opening invocation, already quoted above:
Nothing real can be threatened.
Nothing unreal exists.
Herein lies the peace of God.
What on earth does that even mean? But let’s put that aside for now and continue to analyse the text.
So what exactly is the basic teaching?
That God is love is real, and we (the humans) are the unreal. If there is anything wrong in the world, then it’s because we have made it so. But there is a way out — through a kind of ‘forgiving love’, because love is all there is. The course book is a manual to instruct us as to how best to correct our unreal and mistaken view of things.
But what are the ‘miracles’ exactly?
(Quotes from Chapter 1: The Meaning of Miracles)
9. Miracles are a kind of exchange. Like all expressions of love, which are always miraculous in the true sense, the exchange reverses the physical laws. They bring more love both to the giver and the receiver.
12. Miracles are thoughts. Thoughts can represent the lower or bodily level of experience, or the higher or spiritual level of experience. One makes the physical, and the other creates the spiritual.
34. Miracles restore the mind to its fullness. By atoning for lack they establish perfect protection. The spirit’s strength leaves no room for intrusions.
35. Miracles are expressions of love, but they may not always have observable effects.
36. Miracles are examples of right thinking, aligning your perceptions with truth as God created it. (pp.3–5)
And so on, again. None of these supposed ‘definitions’ actually clarify anything — they’re just puffs of floating sentiment — as well as being full of obvious contradictions. Of course none of this matters to believers, because for them the idea is that belief conquers all, and so being a believer transcends rationality.
‘Miracles’ — as we try to extract meaning from the quotes above — can therefore be described as instances of love which reunite us with ‘God’ which is itself ‘love’.
But what’s nonsensical about this teaching?
Basically because it’s simply an instance of neo-Christian wishful thinking, presented in the form of an instructive dogma, and very specifically designed to appeal to those quite incapable of discriminating between ideas which sound attractive, and ideas which actually have some substance to them. It’s loaded with trigger words to fool people into believing they are in the presence of some sort of higher realisation, when in fact the channellers are spewing out a mishmash of ideas that only make sense if you can’t be bothered to give them a second thought. Pretending to knowledge you don’t actually possess is a long-established form of New Age spiritual tradecraft; not necessarily the worst crime in the world, but wholly deceitful all the same.
The text continually pretends to logical reasoning, but it’s not reasoning, it’s proclamation masquerading as argument. The fact that the book has been set out in an apparently logical and sequential manner — tight paragraphs of supposedly dense argument — is pure subterfuge. It’s self-referential and repetitive sloganeering pretending to be knowledge.
The following paragraphs — chosen more or less at random — demonstrate the grasshopper/scattergun mentality at work:
The Simplicity of Salvation
How simple is salvation! All it says is what was never true is not true now, and never will be. The impossible has not occurred, and can have no effects. And that is all. Can this be hard to learn by anyone who wants it to be true? Only unwillingness to learn it could make such an easy lesson difficult. How hard is it to see that what is false can not be true, and what is true can not be false? You can no longer say that you perceive no differences in false and true. You have been told exactly how to tell one from the other, and just what to do if you become confused. Why, then, do you persist in learning not such simple things?
There is a reason. But confuse it not with difficulty in the simple things salvation asks you learn. It teaches but the very obvious. It merely goes from one apparent lesson to the next, in easy steps that lead you gently from one to another, with no strain at all. This cannot be confusing, yet you are confused. For somehow you believe that what is totally confused is easier to learn and understand. What you have taught yourself is such a giant learning feat it is indeed incredible. But you accomplished it because you wanted to, and did not pause in diligence to judge it hard to learn or too complex to grasp. (p.645)
This is essentially a form of mystical gibberish, something Krishnamurti could have written. It’s using declarative language to try to force the reader to abandon the idea that there is anything here that might be challenged or queried, and encouraging them instead submit to the idea that this all makes perfect sense if only you’ll open your heart to the ‘message’.
But let’s return to the original sentiment, underpinning all the thousands of pages of ‘explanation’. The essential teaching is that this is all about achieving ‘peace of mind’, but has anyone in human history — other than empty-headed dullards— ever achieved ‘peace of mind’? ‘God’ would presumably be delighted with a planet full of people all experiencing ‘peace of mind’, but does anyone take this kind of science fiction scenario seriously? Is this what human existence is ‘all about’? Striving for ‘peace of mind’? Honestly?
ACIM is spiritual misdirection in the sense that it never attempts to reach beyond sentimental imaginings, and so it keeps its devotees locked in a bubble of fantasy. Sentiment has its place in life as we all live it, but can never be a genuine solution to anything, and certainly not to any spiritual quest. There is genuine spiritual knowledge to be had, but to achieve it you have to put sentiment and fantasy back in the playroom cupboard and instead do some serious thinking, and engage in some serious reflection, and learn to do some objective self-observation.
And at the end of the day — I understand this is an entirely personal response — ACIM, as a religious text, is decidedly weird, even creepy. It’s full of strange, vaguely sociopathic injunctions, like this one from Lesson 1 in the ‘Workbook for Students’:
Nothing I See Means Anything.
Nothing I see in this room [on this street, from this window, in this place] means anything.
Now look slowly around you, and practice applying this idea very specifically to whatever you see:
This table does not mean anything.
This chair does not mean anything.
This hand does not mean anything.
This foot does not mean anything.
This pen does not mean anything.
Then look farther away from your immediate area, and apply the idea to a wider range:
That door does not mean anything.
That body does not mean anything.
That lamp does not mean anything.
That sign does not mean anything.
That shadow does not mean anything.
Notice that these statements are not arranged in any order, and make no allowance for differences in the kinds of things to which they are applied. That is the purpose of the exercise. The statement should merely be applied to anything you see. As you practice the idea for the day, use it totally indiscriminately. Do not attempt to apply it to everything you see, for these exercises should not become ritualistic. Only be sure that nothing you see is specifically excluded. One thing is like another as far as the application of the idea is concerned.
Each of the first three lessons should not be done more than twice a day each, preferably morning and evening. Nor should they be attempted for more than a minute or so, unless that entails a sense of hurry. A comfortable sense of leisure is essential. (p.3)
I remember stumbling across these instructions on the web when I was researching criminal psychopathy, and I thought at first that it was mental patient testimony. These are exactly the kind of disassociated musings a suicide bomber would have, and they remind me of Mohamed Atta’s last written instructions to his fellow ‘pilots’.
If this discussion has in any way intrigued and interested you, then please read ‘Doing your spiritual homework’: #1 #2 #3 #4
More on this way of approaching spirituality in ‘Advanced Buddhist Metaphysics: Exercises in Sceptical Spirituality’ from Amazon. (Don’t be intimidated by the title — it’s an easy read for anyone interested.)
Join Medium with my referral link - Peter Eastman
As a Medium member, a portion of your membership fee goes to writers you read, and you get full access to every story…peter-eastman.medium.com