A Course In Miracles workbook

A Course in miracles is a channeled work supposed to come from Jesus Christ who dispels all the mistakes of the bible (both old and new testaments).

My attitude toward any work is to examine it dispassionately no matter what the claim for the genesis of the work.

Thus it does not matter if the Old and New Testaments are the absolute unalterable words of God or a god or inspired or partially inspired mixed with tribal oral histories and superstitions or whatever.

In the same way it does not matter if the real author of "A Course in miracles" is Jesus or the agnostic Jewish psychologist who channeled the piece.

The work should stand up in it's own right.

A Course in Miracles may be summed up as saying:

Nothing real can be thretened.
Nothing unreal exists.
Herein lies the peace of God.

The idea is that all the evil, wrongs and upsets that we see are illusory. It is an idea shared by all the mystical systems that I know from neo-Platonism, Buddhism, Hinduism, Sufism, Cabala, and so on.

A course in miracles has three segments:

1. The text - this gives the theory.
2. The workbook for students - three hundred and sixty five daily exercises.
3. The manual for teachers.

I'll be writing about the workbook in this hub. I just wish to add that what attracted me to A Course in Miracles is its attitude toward lack of sin and need for forgiveness.

The workbook for students of A Course in Miracles is series of three hundred and sixty five daily exercises ideally done over a single year (many people then repeat it all or just the parts which need redoing). Some may take longer over it.

The lessons build on each other and have to be done in succession. I write done because they are exercises which are done and you learn experientially.

Each workbook exercise starts with a thought for the day and then explanation of how to use it.

I have only started the workbook the first of November so I'm on day sixteen as I write this.

I'll give examples of these first sixteen days.

So far we have gone through thoughts like:

• “Nothing I see in this room [on this street, from this window, in this place] means anything.”
• “I have given everything I see in this room [on this street, from this window, in this place] all the meaning that it has for me.”
• “I do not understand anything I see in this room [on this street, from this window, in this place].”
• “These thoughts do not mean anything. They are like the things I see in this room [on this street, from this window, in this place].”

Typically we close our eyes and repeat the thought of the day and then open the eyes and apply the thought to objects and thoughts. Each exercise takes less than two-three minutes (one minute in the beginning) and is repeated three to five times a day.

So we are talking about ten to fifteen minutes a day - so far.

As the workbook writes in the first section of the workbook we get rid of the illusions and then we see the world as it truly is (getting rid of consensus reality and replacing it with a mystical perception).

This first part reminds me of turning around in Plato's myth of the cave in the Republic.

Some of the days make not much sense to me given my past and the fact that while I'm into spirituality and mysticism, I'm also highly trained in science and linguistics. So when we get to ideas such as "these thoughts do not mean anything," I apply the idea to itself and get into a Zen Koan type of a bind.

If these thoughts don't mean anything then the idea that these thoughts don't mean anything in itself does not mean anything and so on.

Other ideas fit in well. I suppose that's why there are review days where you go back and do previous exercises given new insights and that people may go through the workbook many times.

I have heard that people who do that end up gaining new insights each time they go through the workbook.

So far my favorite day is today - day sixteen - the thought for today is:

“I have no neutral thoughts.”

One thing I have noticed is that as I'm doing the exercises I'm becoming more aware of my subliminal or preconscious self talk. These are (mostly) negative self talk that pass through consciousness so rapidly that normally we are not aware of their existence but they effect us negatively to a huge extent.

Today using the extra awareness and the ideas of the course I manged to change my mindset from the negative to the positive quite a few times and coincidentally I observed a minor miracle.

I'm putting links to some of these events and ideas in the next section.