If you have spent enough time exploring spirituality, you likely have found out 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 have it sitting on the bookshelf. It has become a common area of the landscape.
And yet that familiarity goggles what a distinctive and unconventional document A Program in Miracles is. The Course falls into the category of channeled substance, yet many such material generally seems to drive the dunes of common currents of thought, telling us pretty much what we expect to hear: "You are God." "You produce your own personal reality." "You'll have it all."
While the Course echoes countless styles from the world's religious traditions and from modern psychology, what's probably most impressive about it's how original it is. Only when you think that do you know what it will claim, it minds down in a few totally different path, one that seems to have no similar in some other teaching, old or modern.
Therefore, if you want to hear the previous common truths, A Course in Miracles is not for you. On every page, it is attempting to overturn the taken-for-granted assumptions on which your earth is built.
For instance, most of us obviously desire to recognize ourselves through noted achievement, ability, and recognition. We all want to be special. Yet the Program highlights that you could only be unique by being better than the others, and that trying to create others worse than you is definitely an attack. It claims, "Specialness is victory, and their success is [another's] destroy and shame." Trying to beat and disgrace yet another, it claims, just leaves you burdened with guilt.
Likewise, most of us attempt to style a positive picture of ourselves, by adopting pleasing appearances and responsible behavior. Yet the Program says that picture we've so carefully constructed is actually an idol, a false lord that we praise instead of our true identity, which no picture can catch: "You have no image to be perceived." The Class claims that we don't require a finished image or unique attributes, for underneath these superficial things lies a historical identification that's just like everyone else else's yet has endless worth.
Ultimately, we all think that if you have a God, the world was produced by Him. The Course reminds us of what we all know, that the entire world is really a place of putting up with, illness, war, and death. Then it says, "You but accuse Him of madness, to believe He produced a world wherever such points appear to have reality. He is maybe not mad. Yet just madness makes a world like this."
When you have ever suspected that there is something profoundly incorrect with the world, that there is an insanity that's seeped in to every thing, including perhaps your personal center, then your Class could be for you a course in miracles podcast. For it's in the midst of the poor information that it produces its great news.
It promises, "There's a means of living on the planet that's not here, although it seems to be." In this manner, the painful hearings of living no further govern our state of brain, or determine our reaction to others. We are able to find "quiet even in the middle of the turmoil" of the world. We can react with open-handed generosity, even though the others make an effort to hurt us. We could let go of the past even if their residue lies all around us. We are able to walk through our day with "number cares and no concerns...no fear of potential and no past regrets" even if we have didn't manifest the life of our dreams.
How do we achieve that unshakable peace? We get down to business and set about retraining our minds. We practice viewing things differently. In this process, the Course provides abundant help. It has a huge selection of exercises directed at shifting people into a new perception-exercises in forgiveness, entering today's, viewing ourselves differently, and experiencing God.
Yes, the method takes energy (how did energy become so unpopular?). And sure, it promises to show our inner world upside down. Yet possibly we have developed tired of our internal world, maybe even a little tired of it. Probably we've pointed out that as mercurial because it is, it's remarkably tolerant to real change. Probably, then, we're prepared to test something new, or to take anything down the ledge that people just believed was familiar. Probably A Program in Miracles is the one thing we have been looking for.
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