Exploring A Course in Miracles

Times like these call us to be better people. They call us to be anchored within so that we can respond with love and helpfulness to the world outside. This may seem like a distant goal, but this is precisely where A Course in Miracles can help. The Course is known for its unique wisdom and its practical exercises, all of which are aimed at helping us meet a stormy world in a new and different way. Regardless of where you are in your Course journey, we know you will benefit from the Course's teaching on how we can truly advance on our spiritual path, and be the people we are called to be in the new year and beyond.

It's clear that, all around the globe, we have a hate problem. As spiritual seekers, we tend to shy away from using the word hate, but that's what it is. And until we face our hate directly, it will remain a destructive force in us and in the world.

A Course in Miracles doesn't shy away from the word "hate" and its cognates, which appear over 200 times in the book. Accordingly, the Course is well equipped to help us heal the hate within us. In this episode of Exploring A Course in Miracles, Robert and Emily offer practical tools for facing and rooting out the hate in our hearts so that we can heal it in our world.

As we look around at the world today, insanity appears to be everywhere. In such a place as this, how can we choose love? According to A Course in Miracles, we face this choice between insanity and love at all times. The question is only which direction we will go. Will we decide that the world is sane or that love is sane? Will we adjust to a world that makes no sense, feeling that we must fit in? Or will we buck the system and choose to love like God loves? In this episode of Exploring A Course in Miracles, Robert and Emily discuss how we can all stand for love in an insane world.

How should we see other people? Perhaps the Course's main answer to this question is that we should see them as holy. Holiness is a hugely important concept in A Course in Miracles, which contains over a thousand references to "holy" and "holiness." Yet we don't talk much about holiness, do we?

Perhaps we find it slightly threatening, because of its religious connotations. But the fact that we find it threatening also means that it's powerful. Given what a powerful concept it is, imagine what it would mean to see another person as holy. What would it mean to see everyone as holy, no matter what that person is like or may have done? In this episode, Robert and Emily explore the power and significance of seeing our brothers as the Course would have us see them.

When it comes to the topic of specialness, the Course is challenging something in us that we have hoped to keep forever hidden and safely undisturbed. The goal to achieve "special favor", the Course says, is what originally drove the separation and it's what drives us now – to disastrous effect. Accordingly, the reason we all hide our quest for specialness, even from ourselves, is the very reason we need to give it up: Specialness puts us at war with all our brothers. It therefore makes us fundamentally alone. In this episode, Robert and Emily have a very candid discussion on facing our addiction to being special - human race's guilty secret—and how we can let go of this need in recognition of our equal holiness and worth.

Contemporary spirituality constantly tells us that we have to get out of our mind and into our heart. We hear again and again that in order to spiritually awaken we need to "turn off our thinking" and enter into being. A Course in Miracles, however, teaches that sound reasoning is not the enemy of spiritual development, but rather a central tool in the process. In this episode, Robert and Emily discuss why the Course considers logic and reason among the most powerful means we have for dispelling ego-based emotions that seem to have us in their grip.

Monastics are defined in part by their withdrawal from ordinary society as well as by such outer things as distinctive clothing, specific daily schedules, special diet, and other symbolic accoutrements. Yet if we set aside these forms of difference, monasticism has more in common with the Course than you might suspect.

The driving force behind monasticism is that it shoots for the highest spiritual attainment possible. Further, it recognizes that this spiritual summit is so valuable, so precious, that the climb deserves all of us—-heart, mind, body and soul. In this episode of Exploring A Course in Miracles, Robert Perry and Emily Bennington discuss how we can use the discipline and structure of monastics as a model and an inspiration for our own practice everyday.

What exactly does the term "special function" mean in A Course in Miracles? At first glance, the term appears to imply there is actually some special job for each of us—a specific calling, a life purpose.

In this episode of Exploring A Course in Miracles, Robert Perry and Emily Bennington dive deeper into this topic and discuss how to find and fulfill your special function in the world.

To download the accompanying articles for this episode, please visit www.circleofa.org/25. 

Exploring A Course in Miracles offers in-depth conversations on Course-related topics from Circle of Atonement founder Robert Perry and executive director Emily Bennington. To learn more about Circle of Atonement offerings for your spiritual journey, including our Complete and Annotated Edition (CE) of A Course in Miracles and our Course Companions online learning community, please visit www.circleofa.org.

If the title of this article strikes you as odd, you are not alone. People familiar with A Course in Miracles don't usually think in terms of its social vision. Doesn't the Course urge us to "seek not to change the world"? Isn't our sole responsibility to accept the Atonement for ourselves? Isn't the Course strictly about how we perceive the world in our own minds?

We at the Circle have been arguing for years that the Course is deeply concerned with our role in uplifting the world, and that it even sees us carrying out this role through a great deal of "busy doing". In this episode of Exploring A Course in Miracles, Robert Perry and Emily Bennington discuss how we can use our own lives to become an "oasis in the desert" and achieve Jesus' vision of social change.

We are living through an unprecedented moment in history. It's a moment where pockets of the world have been willing to finally look at the gaping wound of racism and what it's doing to us. As Americans, we know this wound is a central part our origin story but what feels different about this time is the degree to which those who are outside the black the community are willing to not only examine white privilege, but willing to examine its contribution to the dishonoring and disenfranchisement of our black brothers and sisters. This includes acknowledging the ways in which contributions from the black community to so much of what we take for granted, and so much of what we consider sacred, have been undervalued and unappreciated.

The movie "Hidden Figures" captured this concept in the story of three black women who were behind very successful missions at NASA, and whose stories were not widely known until recently. A Course in Miracles has its own "hidden figure" and that's what we talk about in this episode of Exploring A Course in Miracles with our guest Freedom Cartwright. All of us at the Circle wish to thank Freedom and Laura Yates Campoli for their dedication to bringing this story to light.