Helen Schucman

The teaching

Taught from A Course in Miracles (1976), with its Text, Workbook and Manual for Teachers, and its two pamphlets.

The Course in brief

The Course opens by naming itself: “This is a course in miracles. It is a required course. Only the time you take it is voluntary.” It does not aim to teach the meaning of love, which is beyond what can be taught, but to remove the blocks to the awareness of love's presence, which is everyone's natural inheritance. The opposite of love is fear, yet what is all-encompassing can have no opposite, and so the whole Course can be put in three sentences: “Nothing real can be threatened. Nothing unreal exists. Herein lies the peace of God.”

The tiny, mad idea

Only what God creates is real, and God creates only what is like himself: eternal, whole and one. His creation is his Son, which in the Course means all minds together, one with him in heaven. Into that eternity, it says, crept a tiny, mad idea, the thought of being separate, at which the Son of God forgot to laugh. Taking it seriously, the mind dreamed a world of bodies, time and space, of many selves each alone, in which the separation seems real. The world we see is that dream; God did not make it, and the Course calls it an illusion.

From the same idea comes guilt. The mind that believes it has broken away from God believes it has done something terrible and fears punishment; it cannot bear the guilt, so it projects it outward and sees it in others, and the world becomes a place of attack and defence.

Two voices

Every mind, the Course teaches, hears two voices. The ego is the voice of the belief in separation: it speaks for guilt, fear and attack, counsels the mind to defend itself, and reads every event as proof that the separation is real. The Holy Spirit is the Voice for God, given to the mind at the very moment it seemed to separate, as the answer to it. He does not destroy the dream but reinterprets it, using every situation in the world as a lesson in its undoing.

The choice between them can be made in any instant. The Course calls it the holy instant: a moment in which the mind lets go of past and future, holds no grievance, and receives the Holy Spirit's way of seeing. Each such instant is a small undoing of the separation, which the Course calls the Atonement.

Forgiveness

Forgiveness is the Course's whole practice, and it means something unusual. It is not the pardon of a real wrong while the wrong is kept in mind; that kind of forgiveness only confirms the sin it claims to overlook. True forgiveness recognises that what a brother was thought to have done has not occurred: nothing he did has touched the truth of either, and the guilt seen in him was one's own, projected. In letting it go for him, one lets it go for oneself, for the mind is one.

The same is taught of relationships. A special relationship, of love or of hate, is a bargain in which another person is used to fill a lack or to carry a blame. A holy relationship is one in which two share a single purpose, forgiveness, and so find that they are one.

Miracles

A miracle, in the Course, is not a marvel in the world but a correction in the mind: a shift of perception from fear to love. Its first principle is “There is no order of difficulty in miracles.” None is harder or greater than another, since all are the same correction; they are natural, the expression of a mind that has accepted love, and they come not from effort but from a willingness to see differently.

The Workbook

The Workbook has three hundred and sixty-five lessons, one for each day of a year, and no more than one is taken in a day. The first part undoes the way the world is seen; the second leads toward true perception. The lessons begin simply. The first asks the student to look about the room, or the street, or whatever is in view, and to say of each thing seen, without choosing among them, that it does not mean anything. The practice periods are short and often repeated, applied to whatever is there, and never strained.

The Workbook asks for no belief. “Remember only this; you need not believe the ideas, you need not accept them, and you need not even welcome them,” its introduction says: only use them, for their effect does not wait on agreement. Its last lessons rest in one prayer: “This holy instant would I give to You. Be You in charge. For I would follow You, certain that Your direction gives me peace.”

The teachers of God

The Manual for Teachers says that a teacher of God is anyone who chooses to be one, of any faith or none, by seeing another's interests as not apart from their own. It names ten marks of such a teacher: trust, honesty, tolerance, gentleness, joy, defencelessness, generosity, patience, faithfulness and open-mindedness. Trust is the foundation on which the rest stand, and open-mindedness, perhaps the last to be gained, is bound up with forgiveness.

Healing and prayer

The pamphlets carry the teaching into healing and prayer. Sickness, the Course holds, is a decision of the mind, a defence the separated mind makes against the truth, and healing is the mind's return to peace; in the pamphlet on psychotherapy the therapist and the patient are healed together, through forgiveness. The Course itself allows bodily remedies where fear is too great for the mind to accept healing directly, and the house adds plainly what it says everywhere: illness is no one's fault, it belongs with a doctor, and no cure is promised.

Prayer, in the second pamphlet, is a ladder. It begins in asking for things out of need, climbs to asking for others and with others, and ends in a song without words, in which nothing is left to ask and there is only thanks and union. Forgiveness is prayer's companion all the way up.