(Three volumes, 1100 pp., Foundation for Inner Peace, 1975.)

A growing number of us who made our “journey to the East” and undertook practices such as meditation and yoga seem to be experiencing a phase of return. For one of the benefits of the Eastern practices seems to have been an increased ability to appreciate the transcendent wisdom embodied in our own Western Christian heritage.

This phase of return is synchronous with three recent extremely important historical developments. One is that for the first time in history we have available to us the collected wisdom teachings of all cultures and can now appreciate the common core which underlies them all—what has been called “the perennial wisdom,” “the perennial philosophy” or “the transcendent unity of religions.” Secondly, developments in Western psychology have allowed us to recognize that this perennial core comprises a road map of mind training aimed at inducing transcendent states of consciousness. And thirdly, the discovery in the Egyptian desert of the Nag Hammadi library or “gnostic gospels” has revealed that Christ’s teaching and the early church were far more mystical and closely related to Eastern Traditions than we had previously suspected.

Yet another synchrony has been the publication of A Course in Miracles, an anonymous three-volume set of contemporary writings, decidedly Christian in style, yet clearly and profoundly embodying the perennial wisdom. Since their appearance in 1975 they have spread by word of mouth alone, becoming what Psychology Today described as “an underground bestseller” and receiving the highest praise from many Christians, Jews, Buddhists and Hindus alike.

Like any profound teaching the Course can be read at many levels and from many perspectives and defies simple definition and categorization. Any description of it must, therefore, be only partial and subjective. With this caveat in mind, the following points may give some preliminary sense of it.

The Course is laid out in three volumes. The first, a text, presents the underlying thought system. The second is a workbook consisting of 365 lessons, one to be done each day, and the third is a teacher’s manual which clarifies terms and facilitates the teaching–learning process.

The Course is an exceptionally rich multidimensional teaching, and students of comparative religion will recognize elements of many traditions: contemplation, meditation, and bhakti, karma and jnana yogas. One of its unique features is a strong emphasis on, and guidelines for, the use of relationships as vehicles for growth. It also contains sophisticated insights, on a par with some of the best contemporary psychological thinking, into such phenomena as perception, belief, defenses and identity.

However, although the Course contains a sophisticated thought system, it is clearly not designed for merely intellectual analysis but rather for direct practical and experiential application. One of the beauties of the daily lessons is that they are intended to be applied in one’s daily life as a form of karma yoga and do not demand long periods of isolation and retreat. Rather, they are meant to be tested in daily life, experienced in their emotional fullness, practiced in all activities and expressed in all relationships.

The most commonly reported initial difficulty in working with the Course concerns a distaste for the Christian terminology which many of us were innoculated against in Sunday school. Another is that if one is working with the daily lessons then, like meditation, the first thirty days or so may seem somewhat slow and unproductive. However, those who persist almost always find that both difficulties diminish and that the surprisingly small demands on time and effort which the Course makes are well worthwhile.

∞

From the Spring 1985 issue of Inquiring Mind (Vol. 2, No. 1)

Text © 1985–2023 by Roger Walsh