 A Course in Miracles is a course in your individual discovery of a new self-realization; that is, a contact with another form or essence of reality that literally transforms your mind. It is a mind-training device that will afford you, literally, an enlightenment of your own mind.
The direction of this teaching is to the certainty that it's possible for you as a member of the species Homo Sapiens, as you define yourself, to undergo an experience in your mind that will show you a new reality based on eternal life, rather than on the conditioned reality in which you find yourself. This is simply the idea that there is a process by which you individually could have an experience of – “God.” What is the theology? What is the truth, the true study of A Course in Miracles? The theology of A Course in Miracles is that there's one reality. It is eternal and extends eternally. It has no exception, and it is singular. That simple. What is the philosophy of A Course in Miracles? The philosophy is, since the theology is that “truth is true and nothing else is true”, the philosophy must be the necessity for you initially to include yourself in with the entirety of reality. Again, not open to a discussion of what you would call doctrines of perceptual identity. In fact, there's no concern at all about your conceptual identity in relationship with yourself, except in the philosophy of the necessity to include it in with the singular reality. What is the psychology? How do you do it? You are a continuing instruction of your association with who you think you are within your identity of yourself and attempting to convey to another human association, who you are in that relationship. In fact, you are locked in a cause and effect relationship of temporal space/time that is not what eternal life is. And there occurs the dichotomy. The problem, obviously, is that your identity in this world is based on a justification of your body identity. The direction that I'm going to offer you is that's not true, that life is eternal and that you cannot not be a part of that eternal life. All right? You are, at this time, a source of reality that is confining you to an apparent separation from the totality of God. Is it real? It's very real to you. Obviously, it's not real if life is eternal. Obviously, it's not real if there is a single, whole happiness. If life itself is forever and you are a whole part of it, it wouldn't take a great deal of perceptual discernment to say, “This is not that.” The Text and the Workbook of the Course in Miracles, presumes that you have decided within the fabric of your own self-identity in this dream of death in space/time that there is an alternative to the manner in which you're identifying yourself. That's the whole teaching. The purpose of this course is to bring about a transformation of your mind to the realization of the joy and happiness that is inevitable in the species of man; that is, in an animal that prays. If you want to look at it that way, A Course in Miracles is a course in prayer where you begin to – what? Practice the transformation of your mind. There's a manner in which your conceptual identity, which cannot be directly linked to reality, or it would become that, can come to know the reality of eternal life through a practice – and we might as well get to it – of negation or relinquishment of your conceptual self. And you say, “Well, what's new about that?” Everybody knows that the meditative techniques of the Eastern tradition, for example, are for us to come together. What are we going to do? We're going to still our minds. We have come to know (this is the mind-training) that there is an alternative that is available to us if we can release our preoccupation with what we are determined to do out in the world, based on our old and future references. In a very real sense the Workbook of A Course in Miracles is a meditative technique. Very probably, the reason that you are listening and, perhaps, experiencing the mind-offering I am giving you is because you have finally become sufficiently frustrated with your location in temporal space/time. Everybody walks around and says, “What is the meaning of life?” nd since the question must include the answer, they immediately give, in their own conglomerate of associations, a meaning. And that becomes – what? Who you are. You then foster that meaning in the condition of your conceptual self, verified by the projections of your conceptual mind that allow you to associate in this little, limited frame of reality. Most of us who have pursued this Course in Miracles – and this is the entire teaching – have been led into an admission in a single moment of our inability to solve the problem of our existent identity. At that moment, having turned our will over to God, we had an experience that transcended this. This is the entire purpose of the Workbook of A Course in Miracles. It has no other purpose. - Master Teacher From Video 1, “Illuminate Mind-Training Series”
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