Note from a Course in Miracles survivor

[PHIon]

In the early 80s, I began studying A Course in Miracles (ACIM) because something inside felt drawn to it. I really got in to the love vs. fear mindset back then. Many other books came out at that time as well by authors like Hugh Prather, Gerald G. Jampolsky and Ram Dass (Richard Alpert from Harvard, who has already been outed by Miles Mathis).

Now I see the whole ACIM project as a psyop but back then it was very compelling to me. For one thing it appeared to be offering something more than what organized religion was offering, and structurally it was written entirely in iambic pentameter which fascinated me. Also, certain themes kept reappearing as a symphonic work is wont to do with its melodies. In other words, the structure didn't contain chapters where that chapter was the only place to find information on a particular subject. The themes kept being recalled throughout all three books.

There was also a local radio show here hosted by Jim Stewart, who used to host a children's puppet TV show here locally in Chicago called "Here's Geraldine" as well a travelogue program called "Passage to Adventure" among others. He later left TV and turned his attention toward teaching ACIM on a local time-brokered radio station, where each show producer pays the station for the block of airtime. He offered one-day classes on the books in his apartment and I went to one of these seminars with about 10 people or so attending in all.

These were the days before Marianne Williamson began selling the Course on Oprah. Williamson always rubbed me the wrong way and she never seemed to really believe what she was saying anyway. One of the goals of ACIM is to get you to abandon ego, which I tried to do unfortunately, but individuation acknowledges both our spatial and temporal halves instead of getting us to choose between them. Also, ACIM doesn't make a distinction between soul and spirit as I remember it, but these two are not the same as most here might probably agree.

I suppose the reason I wanted to write this post was because I realized that even though I was clearly duped, in the long run I am truly seeking to grow as an individual in rapport with my environment (didn't think of it quite that way back then) and that ultimately helped me move through and beyond that which was false, with a little wisdom picked up along the way hopefully. Somehow, I gladly found my way here (Wilcock had something to do with that for sure) to a reciprocal view of Nature (corpus), soul (anima) and spirit (ethical control unit), where thinking, feeling, sensing and intuiting are all equally valid.

I would certainly like to read a Miles Mathis paper on the folks involved with the Foundation for Inner Peace, the publishers of the books, but it would probably be a slam dunk waste of time for him, especially since Penguin got involved later, yet a lot of people were caught up in this movement and might benefit from a truther-type knock on the head. There seem to be some numerological red flags in the dates cited on the official ACIM website as well. Maybe I'll shoot an email his way about it. I'll see.

In order for a psyop to work there needs to be some truth in it or else it would be too easy to dismiss it. For example, the books say "we seek in others what we feel is wanting in ourselves," which sounds like a rewording of the projection "formula" where we expect others to carry (act out) for us what we are suppressing in the unconscious. So you read that and think, well that sounds true, I guess I'll read on. Maybe the rest is true to. And on it goes.

[daniel]

You can search the Internet for "A Course in Miracles mk-ultra" and find out more than you wanted to know. It was basically the precursor to the New Age movement to direct people away from the actual research being done into the paranormal during the 1950s.

[binra]

I am at one with the teaching within A Course in Miracles.
In its own terms - but you can of course test this for yourself, 'what something is, is determined by what you use it for'.

I don't use A Course in Miracles terms to 'teach' or demonstrate its principles - because I don't hang out in a social identity of association with it. That is not what I use it for.

The CIA in that era funded all kinds of things in the 'psychic' field - as they have in the tech field. Seed beds of feeling out potentials that are parsed for weaponising or marketising.

Anything coming into 'this world' (the ego frame of reference') comes into the mind of possession and control - or defence of its 'self-possession'). And so movements are subverted, absorbed, mainstreamed or coopted as a vector for mind control - like environmentalism or feminism - not that there isn't a seed in these of a genuine movement of integrity, but that it becomes 'identity politics' of the grievance, and the self righteous hate of polarised breakdown of communication.

I am not 'selling' A Course in Miracles or promoting it as The Way - but if I feel moved I will mention it - which is not often, because it is a specialised form of the Universal Course in abandoning grievance as a source of power so that what is already true - moves us truly. Such is the power of a true synchronicity. No call to be anywhere or anywhen else.
So if you have suffered A Course in Miracles abuse or had your feelings offended - but have survived to now bad mouth it - then you have your reward. That is - you have the result of your decision - whether or not you let yourself know what you were doing.

Everything the ego thinks to know is wrong - (it cannot actually know anything - being a substitution for knowing)
But you are not and never were an 'ego' - which is the part of your mind that believes itself apart and alone - and therefore in need of defence, allies and reinforcement. Such is the 'price' of self-specialness.
But you are never your belief - even if you suffer or be-live it as your reality.
This fact - and it is fact - is all the difference in the world we meet.

I don't care to be a survivor - in other words to be defined by a past made in anger, fear or guilt.
I acknowledge the habit - and live the willingness of a different choice. A new 'habit association'.
Instead of coming from a past - why not live from a Presence? - which underneath all our stories - is simply true.
My past then becomes my curriculum of revisiting and revisioning blocks or false self-definitions - because all that we haven't released (emotional conflict) re-enacts upon our present into the future - until recognised and released.
Regardless whether A Course in Miracles is part of your 'companioning in Spirit' - you have given it a negative charge and so you carry and attract this and will be triggered by it or 'sabotaged' by it in various forms of association. This need not be.

I don't ask you or anyone to believe A Course in Miracles - that would be mindless. But holding a strong belief against anything bringing you to love's awareness now, is a conditional demand that literally blocks incoming guidance of a truly protective recognition - rather than the protection racket of a false-sense of loveless self-reinforcement.

Jesus said something like My Father's Kingdom is not of this world. The true will or desire is not for anything the world CAN give - yet in aligning truly, the world will reflect the qualities of truth - but it isn't OUT THERE in forms that can be grasped, possessed, and defended against loss. That was something 'ELSE" that we thought we wanted, that we thought was us, that seemed special - and which once engaged in always kept us wanting more (in lack driven identity).

To thine own self be true - and it follows as night follows day, that you can be false to no man!
It really does take one to know one. You simply cannot experience what you are not the vibration of - and so... use that to undo a faulty approach. 'Looking for trouble' - finds it! And this then IS your self-reinforcement as you 'ordered' - but is it what you WANT? You have an experiential result by which to determine the parameters of your seeking.

The Course uncovers the evils that you fear in the 'CIA' and etc - in our own heart - if you abide with it as the revisiting of the 'foundations of the ego' - Separation Trauma. Many are intensely wanting the evils to be kept OUT THERE, and many of such are wanting to hide from or be kept hidden from them - and so the mind of masking deceits runs the fake world - be-lived as reality and seeming being violated BY REALITY! But the important word there was seemingly.

You have to WANT Peace to seek and find it - and in my experience that is as a result of recognising you no longer want to suffer (and teach) conflict and all the insanity that follows on from it. This for me is no longer being able, or truly willing to mask or evade it (myself). What is fear - brought fully conscious? It is a Call - that was kept hidden. Where else would we hide but in the last place we want to look! Be the Call that fear would hide. If but for a moment of willingness where the mind wants to recoil.

Our denials are literally hidden from awareness by a consciousness in denial - this is a very 'heavy' recognition - excepting it is the freedom to no longer persist in them and therefore to no longer be subject to them unknowing.

'Forgive them, for they know not what they do' - is a Self-release. But the first step is to pause from reaction and check IN so as to at least not feed a negative reinforcement. Life moves of itself - and finds us quicker when we do not try to DO IT by ourself. But this is not to be believed by wish - but learned within a real relational experience - which is at times messy, challenging, unsettling or horrible! But that isn't where our attention needs to be or we think ourself into fear's reinforcement - rather than even a moment of curiosity.

This gives a sense of what I experience in Life as 'A Course in Miracles'. It isn't in a book. It has no life but that you live the recognition it brings you. This is true of anything in this world - and in that sense the 'Holy Spirit' is a living discernment for any situation. But only through willingness to receive and extend it. The attempt to weaponises or marketise any 'New Wine' is a 'backwards' that dilutes and adulterates the forms of something true, that then substitute for the true.

No one is manipulated in truth - but in a world of manipulation nothing you (think to) know is true.

[Ilkka]

In its own terms - but you can of course test this for yourself, 'what something is, is determined by what you use it for'.

A spoon is used for eating soup and other such food related things, but I can use it for digging, this doesn't make it a shovel so therefore that statement is not as valid as it might be.

I think you are your ego, mind and spirit all together connected to the same body. The one that is in charge at a time is up to you, it is like three people in a same car switching who is the driver, in its simplistic terms actually bit different, but for you to get the idea what I try to explain.

I haven't studied "A Course in Miracles" at all so I cant say what it teaches I only can give my own thoughts about what I have learned from various sources.

I don't ask you or anyone to believe A Course in Miracles - that would be mindless. But holding a strong belief against anything bringing you to love's awareness now, is a conditional demand that literally blocks incoming guidance of a truly protective recognition - rather than the protection racket of a false-sense of loveless self-reinforcement.

This seems to be as pushy as Christianity's teachings, "believe in God or be sent to Hell forever" or something like that, but not as serious threat. I think that other religions have similar teachings about their gods, false gods.

I guess the terrorists of various religious groups see it that way as well as they only try to bring "love's awareness" to the people, but killing other who believe in other things.

It really does take one to know one. You simply cannot experience what you are not the vibration of - and so... use that to undo a faulty approach.

Isn't it true that "you can't bullshit, a bullshitter" or something like that as it takes one to know one. Although I disagree with this one, you can know one even if you are not one yourself, it takes more learning and reference points for that puzzle to be revealed.

[binra]

You can use something for a hateful or loveless intent or it can serve a loving intent - but the assertion or self-belief one is loving can be a mask for a hidden hate.
So I see the statement as being not only valid but always and perfectly valid.
Purpose aligns.
The meaning you experience is all the purpose you gave it - or rather are accepting AS true of you in the moment of living from it.

You say 'I think you are - and make a list of attributes.
It is more direct (transparent to true) to say:
I recognise you are (through sharing being with you) and then realise that the attributes you then assign and give preference to are a value judgement. Insofar as your list point to something real, they are also truly un separate in their unified expression of you, in this time, in this place.

And so the idea of you being in charge of a timeshare sense of compartmentalised 'selves' is a model that you choose or accept BY using it. But if you use it to the degree of conditioning it to run as the default habit or response, then a surface reality operates blind to the underlying model or thought system of which it is but an effect - and not 'in charge of' at all.

Who you accept yourself to be will drive your reality experience. While the mind is many, the heart of knowing is one - and so the fragmentation of the mind in division can seem like many choices that are all ways of not listening to the heart of one, and the heart knows it is not being listened to, because the heart - as I use it here - is the relational knowing or indeed 'relating' as an energetic quality of communication or intimacy. The mind in its own spin can deny the heart by operating from symbols and archetypes of conditioned results accepted as knowing that are specific local interpretations that are not what is actually unfolding now. But the experience of past triggering is always compellingly real in its moment - until the mind of reaction is paused and we listen at the heart - or in the rising of a truly connected and coherent sense of self from which to re-evaluate what is here in its presencing rather than in terms of acquired or learned likes and dislikes or 'loves' and hates.

Pushy? In what way? You are free to believe whatever you want but all choices have consequences.
If you are already set against something in the belief it is worthless - or indeed that You are! then you simply CANNOT learn anything, receive anything or open any meaningful or real relationship. WHO is being pushy? The 'ego' sense of rigid belief is inherently pushy - but presents always in such a way as to claim to be the victim of an unfair situation!

As for Christianity - what do you mean? Group-think reactive pigeon-holed identity labels?
Skimming over generalisations to pick out the bits and pieces that you want to drive your car gives you the false sense of being in charge. A 'devil's pact' if you will of a sense of self-gratification at the expence of really connecting with anyone or anything apart from vague impressions and personal mythologies (narrative identity).

If you don't believe in your self, you are self-damned. But what and who would such a self be?
Whenever your loss of joy and peace comes to your notice, you can know you are holding something you are not in place of your reality. This does not damn you - but releases you from self-struggle to align in curiosity and willingness for the truth - now you have accepted a noticing awareness AS the freedom to choose not to persist in what doesn't work and align in what does.
Strictly speaking believing in yourself is natural, spontaneous and already moving. It is the mind of self-division that squelches or denies the movement of being for a sense of chaos and control - each feeding the other. So again it is the already active blocking beliefs that are the 'pushing' down of the creative AND of the destructive in attempt to not change as if that is escape from threat of 'losing control to be overwhelmed by chaos' or indeed to wreak it.
This puts Spirit without a body and stuffs the body with trauma and so of course where you have locked 'God' out and locked the 'devil' in is the charged imbalance of a home that cannot protect you or actually home you.

The only way to share love's awareness is to extend it - and that means your first responsibility is to accept it for yourself - instead of believing against. But love can only come to a mind that is willing to share it - because that is the nature of love. And so the idea that we can force anyone to 'love' is love of an idol, ideal or ideology put above your relationship with your fellow beings, your true life, and your self.

You are right that the mind can be deceived by the forms or image and symbols or conceptual associations of love.
But love's awareness is in love's terms and not the framing of a fake world of substitutions.

BECAUSE you CAN believe, you are creative and that is the gift of your Creator and never leaves its Source. Because The Creator is freedom, you can extend the gift in like kind, or in a gift to yourself 'special' and apart. But giving love and power to that which is unreal because it is unshared, is a sacrificial futility. This is often grasping on a symbol of a lost love. But that is the belief love can be possessed and therefore dispossessed. As Neil Young once sang;

"To give a love, you gotta live a love.
To live a love, you gotta be "part of".

When will I see you again?

Understand that an inherent contradiction sets up the 'gotta'. If you WANT something then you meet the conditions of its being with you. IT is not being pushy - but a whinging mind will often play the role of being 'pushed against its will'. The truth is the opposite (as always) in that the will is being pushed against by an addiction to mental dissociation (ego).

So of course people mask their terrorism in terms of benign interventions, or necessary collateral damage in promoting democracy and freedom, or killing people with 'side' effects of drugs they are 'educated' to need.

Fake news is false witness. Seeing your own narrative distortions as 'real' is what you then live and speak and share from. It is also a vector of identity manipulation. IE: Others could see you hate pushy people and play to that.

In practice it doesn't matter what we say we believe so much as our actions and demeanour embody what we actually believe. That's why it doesn't matter what 'path' serves you so much as what you use it for. If you hold Life itself worthy and include yourself as your fellow being - then this a a basis through which we can work rest and play together without having to 'check out' and pigeonhole (judge over) and thereby reject others from a presumption of self superiority.

All of this goes on in our face under our own nose largely unnoticed, while we live out FROM a masking sense of self as if it is our self, because the world demanded it and we chose to be part of it - by act and will - before we had developed a conscious model by which to reflect upon it and change our mind about our mind.

BTW - I joined in the conversation and enjoyed listening though my first impressions and finding abetter expression, but what it all illustrates is that the underlying 'territory' is our human conditioning, which runs as unchallengeable reality or seeming self-evident conditions, and becomes invisible to our each unique strategies of coping or adapting and seeking to prosper or at least not lose the little we have - set under such a subjection.

I feel that most would not understand A Course in Miracles, or misinterpret it - UNTIL and unless the conditions of a need for truth shatter the sense of being 'in charge' - then we awaken a different purpose than survival in the terms of a mind or world of lies. Living from Life is not seeking it in some other person, place or time - but first we have to let it in - to recognize that it never went away from us. Love puts us back in charge of what truly is our responsibility - and that is to know what we do, and indeed know our thought from which actions proceed automatically.

If I believe against love, then even love's gifts will seem a cruel and treacherous deceit. But hate and fear will seem protectors from such an evil - that is no my purpose to seek out and destroy (judge against and deny). For 'kindness sake' and in love's name - but belied in nature. Learning to discern the Spirit is discerning purpose. Unshared purpose works a private agenda. Regardless what the form appears, the alignment of purpose is through our own. It takes a thief to catch a thief, is not to say the thieving is active and engaged, but that one who has seen and moved through their own deceits can recognize the patterns of deceit - regardless the forms they take and so NOT engage in them but relate past them to the one who knows not what they do - because they are deceived.

Time falls away when I write.
Perhaps I am one who did not survive A Course in Miracles.
What else - really - would we expect than to be led to the end of our world as we made it?

Or in scientific terms, what would we expect but to uncover truth in which our model is undone, replaced or purified of errors of distortion? Hence a marketising and weaponising 'science' is locked into its model as for its 'survival' - but generates a face or narrative layer to hide the ugly truth and delay the inevitable - even by dying in defiance. Though many find a change of heart in a change of perspective.

[PHIon]

You have to WANT Peace to seek and find it

I appreciate your comments, binra, but I think you are taking my use of the word "survivor" too literally. I was being a little tongue-in-cheek actually, but communicating intent in writing is often difficult. It is my quest for growth that attracted me to ACIM, given the information I had available to me at the time and my belief system back then. In previous generations, the material of Alice Bailey might have been a path a seeker could have taken. I have moved on from writings passed on as channeling and do not regret any of the time I spent studying ACIM because my sincere desire to grow led me to and eventually away from this material. As deeply as I believed what I studied, I also dropped it just like that, because I was ready to see the Universe differently; the goal has always been growth, not a path. I feel the stronger for it because I met some wonderful people in those days and some pretty creepy ones as well. Life is interesting. My quest brought me to RS and RS2 concepts, and the Universe is finally beginning to feel like a place that makes sense.

[binra]

Whatever you accept as true is yours to share in. This means you are free to accept belief as you are to release belief. In this sense your accepted focus of attention operates as a channel for your desire.
Belief that you are not free is wish to be as you are not and make it true. You may defend and protect it as your life, But it has only the life you give it, while you choose to use the belief to share in identifying limitation or conflict as true. ACIM is not survivable. You make a false framed assertion as a basis for dramatic expression. Your experience of ACIM -as of anything - is your gift to yourself regardless the way you choose to frame yourself.
But not given to yourself alone, because you are not alone regardless of whether you accept and extend acceptance or deny and extend denial.

Being of a world that grew or developed the idea of denial, is the freedom to release it for the idea of acceptance.
Whatever you choose or align in growing, may it serve your joy in life.