"Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one." -Albert Einstein
Need help reading A Course In Miracles?
Have you attempted to read the book A Course In Miracles only to find it very difficult to finish? I understand this because it is not an easy book to read. But once I began changing the difficult and off-putting religious language into modern vocabulary, I experienced such personal benefit that I decided to start this blog project. My aim is to offer daily help reading A Course In Miracles so that the value of this powerful spiritual text can reach readers like you.
It is my hope to bring the archaic religious language found in A Course In Miracles into a more relevant translation for modern minds. I seek to make the messages accessible and meaningful for today’s way of thinking. This library of posts is where you can find a supplemental discussion of each of the 365 lessons offered in the Workbook for Students of ACIM.
I highly recommend giving the original publication a try and if you get stuck or frustrated, I hope you find this resource here a useful companion to your journey with the teachings.
Begin with lesson #1 and proceed numerically each day.
The Library of Lessons
Reading A Course In Miracles can be a life-changing experience when you take the time to give it daily attention. It can become a companion to your day-to-day struggles that can bring real and lasting relief. This blog follows each day’s lesson and offers a variety of vocabulary to all the religious words and phrases so that the concepts presented can be related to without holding a traditional Christian worldview. I will not only bring the daily lessons into a more informal language, I will translate all religious terminology to be understood outside of a religious context.
Is A Course In Miracles religious?
No. It is spiritual. A religious practice is an organized structure of behavior and social customs that are (ideally) practiced in an attempt to reach spiritual understanding. A spiritual practice may or may not have an organized religious structure. A spiritual practice is primarily governed by discovering what is true regardless of cultural traditions. Even though A Course In Miracles uses Christian language to describe its lessons, the book is not a religious text. Most traditional Christian religions do not recognize the book as part of the Christian worldview and even consider the work to be dangerous. On the other hand, at first glance, the work can easily be wrongly seen as religious. This can discourage non-religious readers. But A Course In Miracles is, first and foremost a spiritual text, not a religious one. And the book itself explains the difference between spiritual and religious quite eloquently.
The use of religious language in A Course In Miracles is deliberate on the part of the author. The words and phrases that were originally intended to clarify an accurate description of Reality have instead been twisted by religious institutions for centuries for their own purposes of control. Because of this misuse of language, A Course In Miracles puts great effort into reclaiming those terms and restoring them to their spiritual and truthful intent. That is also the main goal of this blog project. The purpose of this “3.0 version” of A Course In Miracles is to continue in the same spirit of the book’s own message and purpose to keep updating the language of how the spiritual ideas are conveyed to modern minds. Language changes. Language becomes dated and ineffective. But the messages of true spiritual teachings stand the test of time because what is true is eternal.
Who am I to translate this classic work?
Who am I to offer translations for the classic work A Course In Miracles?
I someone who feels that the teachings in this book could reach more people if it were explained in a more modern way. I am someone who has completed the course several times and have made the daily lessons part of my life. I turn to the concepts in this book multiple times a day whenever I feel confused or challenged. And I receive practical guidance from the daily lessons that help me live a more peaceful and joyful life. The work helps me and I want to make the teachings available to those who do not have the time or patience to sit and plod through the archaic off-putting religious language. I want to make the work more relatable to modern vocabulary and modern analogies. I am someone who wants to update the Course to a 3.0 version.
The only way I was able to finish the 365 lessons in a year was to take a bit of time to redefine every term used I did not understand or that I did not like. I took great care to ask myself why I did not like a term, and every time, I discovered it was because I’d been taught a definition by my culture that was not at all the way the word or phrase was intended to be used historically. My journaling process was a place where I asked questions, examined my frustrations, and overcame my irritation with the archaic Christian language. But in my journaling, I began to notice that I was actually asking questions to a higher power and answers to my questions always arrived. Not always immediately but it became clear that the book was like a person I was in a very personal relationship with. I could ask it anything and unlike my previous attempts to seek guidance, while reading this book, my life became filled with an experience of support and guidance like I’d never felt before. My personal journaling eventually evolved into a public blogging project because I figured that what I was struggling with was probably happening to other readers.
I felt reluctant at first to share with others how I’ve redefine the religious terms that caused me frustration. But the Course itself often encourage the reader to put the day’s message into one’s own words. So, with the book’s own encouragement, I started to create variations of the daily teachings that offered a more secular language.
I do this in part because it helps me study and learn the messages the book teaches, and in part because once you really learn those messages, you discover that sharing what you learn with others becomes an inevitable interest, if not a down right passion.
I do not feel my commentary here should ever replace the original publication because that publication was a transmission. It holds more energy and power than any translation ever could. This Modern Miracles project is offered as a supplemental resource for readers to go to when something in the Course confuses or slows them down. All my commentary is 100% based on the original publication which I feel is the primary resource for taking the year-long curriculum.
By redefining many of the religious terms used in the book, I have deepened my understanding of the timeless wisdom tucked hidden away in these pages. But the original publication is indispensable. It is my intention to create a companion guide that will help the reader excavate the wisdom hidden in the challenging language to make it more accessible to modern-day readers.
Spiritual teachings endure through the ages because an effort is made by people like you and me to reconnect the messages with more useful language of the times. The book itself is very clear about encouraging the readers to put the lessons into their own words. And that is what I’ve done here.
If it turns out that I interpret one of the lessons wrongly, I do not feel there is any danger to fear. Making mistakes is what A Course In Miracles wants us to relax about. We’re going to make them. That is our learning process. It is my personal experience that, if I am mistaken here or there, this work holds a profoundly patient space for the learning process. It is a course after all. A course teaching spiritual concepts. Spiritual concepts are eternal and thus impervious to corruption.
There is no mistake I could make that has not already been made. All mistakes are sorted in the end. Religious institutions have been misinterpreting the messages of the bible and other spiritual texts for centuries. And still, the teachings of peace and compassion have endured throughout time because those teachings exist outside of time itself.
It is you, dear reader, who will be the first to sense where my own interpretation may be off. And at that moment, you will be locating the very personal empowerment the Course is teaching. You will be locating how important you are to the world by recognizing an error and moving towards its correction. This work will survive any number of misinterpretations because true spiritual teachings have infinite patience for the learning process.