A Course in Miracles

With all the other well-stated reviews out there, it may not be important for me to add my two cents, but in case there's someone out there who stumbles on this... First of all, I'm not writing this to persuade anyone about the Course. Some people simply won't find this conducive to their beliefs, and that's okay. But for those who are willing to give it a try, let me divulge a little about my experience with it. I'm spiritual but also extremely skeptical, so I'd never been able to stick with any one religion or philosophical doctrine beyond Taoism in its ambiguous glory. The virtue of the Course is that it doesn't matter whether the contents are credible to you enough that you can invest in it your lifelong faith, because when you start reading it seriously and practicing the workbook, you will soon be faced with evidence that this path is real and one worth taking. It calls for your faith, but not because you'll be damned to hell otherwise. Your faith in the Course is required just as therapy would require you to have faith that you can be treated.

Having been schooled in a wretched fundamentalist Christian parochial, I try but fail time and again to fathom a loving God, and I recognize this fact more clearly and painfully now that I've been studying the Course. So I approach the Course from a secular and/ or psychotherapeutic perspective when I can't handle all the spiritual overtones, and it works. Take, for instance, Newton's third law, "for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction." We also know (esp if you're familiar with magick and witchcraft) that by some fuzzy logic "what goes around comes around," but the Course defines this in exact terms; whether it's God or our fellow men, if we put up a defense against Him/ them, we're doing the same to ourselves. By judging others, we judge ourselves, and as a child, by learning to hate myself as a sinful creature, I also learnt to hate God, even though on the surface I thought I was a devout 'God-fearing' Christian. The bottom line is that the Course allows you to bring along your doubts and to let go of them gradually as you become ready to do so.

But most of all, A Course in Miracles is a source of healing for everyone. If you're depressed or otherwise mentally unstable, suffering in some way from your past, or just stuck in some 'unlucky' life predicament, this book is a way out. Like several reviewers mentioned above, I never believed that one book could change my life. But it did. And I want it to do the same for anyone else who still wants to believe that there has to be more to this broken-down world than eating and working and sleeping and breeding and dying and then just maybe a Big Mean Judge waiting at the end. It's not easy, it's not instant gratification, but it's a solution and a permanent one, and it doesn't involve a bullet or fast train.