about A Course in Miracles

Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all of the barriers in yourself that you have built against it. ACIM T16 IV 6

‘This is a course in miracles. Please take notes.’ In 1965, Dr Helen Schucman, a highly respected senior research psychologist at Columbia University New York, confided to her colleague Dr William Thetford that an inner voice kept asking her to ‘take notes’. ‘Why don’t you do what it says?’ he said. ‘We can look at it discreetly in the morning and nobody else need ever know.’ And so, secretly, embarrassed, even irritably, she began to scribble down in shorthand what she heard. It was the beginning of an extraordinary process of seven years of inner dictation that became A Course in Miracles. Eventually published privately in 1976, the Course has quietly become a worldwide bestseller, in the original English and in multiple translations, and still bears no author’s name.  

The full story of how A Course in Miracles was written is told in the book's Preface and elsewhere - see the Links for further information. Each of us may also have our own story of how the Course 'came' to us. But stories can never tell the whole story. Reality is always present in all our minds, inviting us to become aware of it. At some point we accept it, in some form that we understand. Sometimes it may magically seem to us that we have been specially called or supernaturally nudged, but this is to underestimate the truly universal meaning of the 'miracle', which represents an inner choice we make at some level to reconnect with the creative power of our shared mind.   
You will awaken to your own call, for the Call to awake is within you. ACIM T11 VI 9

A Course in Miracles is not a religion, it is not a cult, it does not promote any organisation, it is not after your money. It is a course with no grades, no tests, no external tutors. It is a unique curriculum that stands on its own, for any individual who wants to work with it, privately and at your own pace, whatever your background, religion, or personal beliefs. The book is widely available through bookshops, libraries and online. The purpose of A Course in Miracles is to free your mind of guilt, fear and attack, not by suppressing them but by finally realising their futility.

Therefore seek not to change the world, but choose to change your mind about the world. ACIM T21 I 1:7

The language of A Course in Miracles is sophisticated, poetic, at times highly abstract.  The tone is uncompromising, the thinking is exacting and consistent. The Course cautions against wishful thinking and superstition or any kind of ritual or guilty reverence, and asks you to question even your most cherished beliefs. A Course in Miracles asks you to accept nothing on faith, only to try its ideas with an open mind, so that you can experience for yourself the peace of mind that comes of letting go of illusions. There is nothing to lose, for only illusions can fall away. Distinguishing what is real from our fears, fancies and misperceptions is what the Course is about.  
Nothing real can be threatened. Nothing unreal exists. Herein lies the peace of God. ACIM Text: Introduction