This is the second part of a write-up I did on A Course In Miracles in 2024. As much as I resonate with the Course's overall teachings, there are some explanations I prefer to deviate from. This post addresses my thoughts on the absence of the divine feminine figure, the relevance of the body, and the interpretation of magic.

When I first started A Course In Miracles (ACIM), I tried to ignore the fact that every (holy) figure, including the reader, was masculine. Like the language of the Bible, God is our father, we are all brothers, and the Holy Spirit is the He who knows. I searched online for explanations. The consensus I found was that during the time when Jesus was alive, women were not eligible for inheritances. So, to inherit the Kingdom of God, everyone, including women, was all one under the Son of God.

Supposedly, as a woman, I should be grateful for this level of inclusive thinking. But no, I'm not convinced. The book was scribed in the 1970s. By that time, Jesus would've been speaking to a world that had already gone through significant feminist movements. Moreover, there must be a spiritual reason why women have been subjugated in most cultures throughout history in the first place.

With a bit of mental gymnastics, a thought came to mind: Who is it to say that women are a subset of men (as some religious interpretations would have it)? If we take the words literally, we can also think that men are a subset of women since the word "man" is a part of the word "woman". Eventually, I asked myself if l would let my ego be triggered by a three-letter pronoun and denounce the truth of the text. So, I kept on reading.

Still, life has been teaching me to trust my intuition, honour my emotions, and return to my body. The lessons of reclaiming the sacred feminine in me were not going away and that training did not have to conflict with the teachings of the Course. Therefore, I’ve come to believe that the messages in ACIM are meant for the divine masculines within all of us, with Jesus as the teacher and prototype. The Course having been born in a university psychology department fits well with this idea. A place where the thinking mind is allowed to assume that it can know and solve everything, and where blind faith is seen as irrationally foolish, is a good place for a reminder of a greater power beyond the ego.

The Sacred Feminine and the Knowing That We Know

While ACIM teaches us that we first need to know that we don’t know, the sacred feminine in me has taught me that it’s also ok to know. This revelation first came to me after my PhD defence years ago. While the exam went smoothly for the most part, a bit of tension occurred when the Chair did not agree with the answer I gave to one of her questions. But instead of agreeing to disagree, I was subtly “put in my place” as the examinee (and not a peer). To add salt to injury, the external examiner reminded me in a motherly tone near the end that “it’s ok to not know.”

I passed the defence with an award nomination, but that seemingly small event of friction shook my soul. It was only after a few days of sitting with discomfort that I realized what my higher self was trying to tell me: It’s ok to know; it's ok to have my own interpretation of the world. In other words, my personal truth and the universal truths that I intuitively know, just because I know, are valid.

For me, the most disappointing thing from this story was that my truth was undermined by women. But this is not surprising. The voice of the sacred feminine has been discredited in many ways: in and beyond traditional social justice narratives, in events in my own life similar to this one that left me feeling patronized, in the depreciation of Mother Earth’s power through an environmental narrative that relegates her as a damsel who needs saving, and in how esoteric knowledge, which was historically practiced by women, have been witch-hunted and, in ways, continues to be dismissed in institutions. Yet, many of these forms of knowledge have found mass popularity in the New Age movement.

So, I have a feeling that in the 1970s, the rift between men and women, and the archetypal masculine and feminine, were too far apart that our collective spiritual growth had to remain polarized and separate. But something in the air feels different. The evolution of humanity has reached a point where the sacred feminine is ready to return to our consciousness.

The Body: Our Spiritual Home on Earth

While Mother Earth is the feminine embodiment of our planetary home, our bodies are the physical homes that give space to our life experiences. However, ACIM reminds us that we are not our bodies. Moreover, the body is what gives us the illusion that we are separate. Although this teaching is true because we are indeed consciousness, the body is also the only place where we can experience the oneness of our conscious presence.

Of course, you can always argue that because oneness is the natural state of the universe, the illusion of separation, and therefore, our bodies and our egos are fundamentally spiritual errors. But if that is so, and we can live peacefully in an unmanifested state of oneness, why would any spiritual entity want to incarnate as a human being? Why would we want to be here in a world of timelines, narratives, and bodies?

Perhaps, the opposition we see between our spiritual existence and our corporeality as living beings is the actual illusion of separation? Perhaps, this illusion is what has been causing our pathology of placelessness as a species? Perhaps, our inability to reconcile these two realities is what drives us (now and in the past) to settle for hastier routes to oneness through death, violence, and destruction? ACIM notes that the ego wants to kill us, but maybe the ego isn’t really a villain and is merely an ineffective advisor who tries to sell us lazy short-cuts to our goals?

Somewhere along the path of my healing, I realized that we are here to bring Heaven to Earth. We are here to learn to live with time and narratives, through our bodies, in a state of unity. At this time in history, this “we” may only include those who feel called to take on the role of a lightworker, but ultimately, this “we” will become our collective destiny and purpose as human beings.

But before we can feel the bliss of Heaven, whatever Hell on Earth that has been created so far, repressed and locked in our bodies must be freed and expressed, not through violence or projection, but through radical truth and acceptance. So, ultimately, we cannot deny the value of our bodies if we want to be awakened. Rather, the body is our key to returning to our spiritual home on Earth.

In Defence of Magic

ACIM states, “Miracles fall like drops healing rain from Heaven on a dry and dusty world, where starved and thirsty creatures come to die.” At first, I thought it was ironic that such miracles from the Kingdom of Heaven would come from a mind that would see our world as dry and dusty, that death is pitiful, and that our existence in physical form is pointless. But now I see another interpretation: those who see life on Earth in such ways are actually the ones in dire need of miracles. In the image of rain drops nourishing the earth, I can't help but think of the magic of a forest. So, the last topic I want to address is the interpretation of magic and miracles.

ACIM uses these two terms very specifically and differently from how we normally use them. Magic, as referenced in the Course, is related to the psychological condition of magical thinking—the error of a causal link between unrelated events. However, in ACIM, this magical thinking applies to all cause and effect between the world and the mind. A miracle is the realization that this cause and effect is just an illusion because the world is always a creation of the mind. The error in believing that the mind can go outside of itself to fix itself and to fix the world, and vice versa, that the external world has power over us, hinders our access to forgiveness (atonement) and universal love.

This all makes sense to me conceptually, but what I find tricky with ACIM and many other spiritual teachings is the challenge to get past the “mind’s” conditioning of language. Spiritual truth then often becomes a circular reference that many “minds” cannot decipher (e.g., "Form is emptiness; emptiness is form," from the Heart Sutra). So before we can even unravel our attachments to particular definitions of magic, we have to contend with the word “mind.”

The creative mind in ACIM (and the one used in the law of attraction) isn’t the thinking mind. The error in believing so, with the Cartesian foundation of “I think, therefore, I am,” has set us off on a destructive trajectory since The Age of (Philosophical) Enlightenment. Rather, this creative mind refers to the Dreamer—the mind that dreams the world into being through ethereally connected and separate bodies of spiritual existence. The physical laws, scientific conclusions, and social norms we operate from are the world-building rules we’ve set up for this dream.

While I can get behind ACIM’s description of the error in our universal magical thinking, the dreamer in me prefers to safeguard our Earthly definition of magic because it gives us room for the rules of our dream world (i.e., our perceptive reality) to change. We can say that surrendering to the Holy Instant and allowing miracles does exactly that, but my surrendering to the grace of miracles requires a certain kind of magic. This magic is the nourishment my Inner Child needs to remain innocent in the face of the ego’s temptations to persuade her that she is guilty.

The magic of the Innocent Child is grounded through Heaven on Earth. Nurtured by the Earth Mother, this magic is fertile. It reminds us that life is a miracle in itself. Contrarily, death also supports life. A dead tree is habitat for many organisms. Animals also sustain life by consuming what has already died. So, we don’t need to condemn anyone or start a war to return to oneness. We are complete in our existence exactly as we are, right here, right now. Because life and death already exist, oneness is already here.

I felt like this was a good time to bring back a couple of posts I wrote on A Course in Miracles in 2024 on my old blog. This is the first one, which summarizes a few of the key lessons.

A Course in Miracles (ACIM) had been on my radar ever since I first read listened to Marianne Williamson’s A Return to Love: Reflections on the Principles of ‘A Course in Miracles.’ At that time and the years after, I had no desire to check out the original source, but as the saying goes, when the student is ready, the teacher will appear. Perhaps I was desperate for miracles to happen because after I had watched one of Eckhart Tolle’s YouTube videos on ACIM, I was intuitively called to get a copy of the book and embark on the Course.

I would describe ACIM as a “New Age Bible.” Channelled and recorded word-by-word by Columbia University psychology professor Helen Schucman between 1965 and 1972, with the help of her colleague William Thetford, the Course is taught by a narrator Schucman recognized as Jesus. For me, knowing that this mystic information was born in an academic setting was already a miracle since I had been frustrated with academia’s reluctance to embrace spirituality. I had been increasingly intuiting the operations of guilt in institutions and I had started to use the term "the innocence of knowledge" without fully knowing why. But after reading ACIM, many of my obscure philosophies began to make more sense.

I have yet to master my miracle-working abilities, but I was surprised that many of the Course's teachings were lessons that I had been working through in such abstract forms that my mind didn’t even fully understand. In this post, I’ll share core lessons of the Course that resonated with me and in the next post, I'll write about some diversions I have with the material.

1. The authority problem and the source of all evil: to erroneously believe that we are the author of ourselves (i.e., to identify with the ego)

ACIM teaches us that souls are given authorship from God (or whatever name you want to call the ultimate divine power). To deny otherwise is to choose the ego as the authority which comes with all the errors in our perceptions of the world. This lesson certainly triggers my ego who wants to believe that I can change myself all by myself and change the world with me. Despite often forgetting the futility of this error, I have learned through experience to know the importance of this humbling lesson.

2. The foundation of the ego’s world is guilt

The ego is the result of the illusion of separation. The ego creates judgement and attacks others (or themselves) with it to maintain this separation. Those who do not attack are the ego’s enemies because they have a better chance of letting it go. Therefore, to release guilt is to release the ego. To the ego, the guiltless are guilty. If you pay attention, you may be surprised at how often you do something (or not do something) to avoid guilt. You'd also notice how much our society operates through guilt.

3. Forgiveness is to let go of the ego’s judgement and to allow for divine atonement

Forgiveness is to correct the ego’s errors. The power within forgiveness is that it requires divine intervention. We can’t will our way into forgiving. We can only allow it to happen by temporarily suspending the ego's stories. The Course calls this the Holy Instant when we surrender the projection of guilt to the Holy Spirit. In simple terms, it means surrendering our attachment to the pain caused by judgment to a larger universal power in a moment of complete presence.

In ACIM, the Last Judgment is God’s final verdict of our holiness, which is always a positive verdict when we surrender. However, the practical me likes to think of the Last Judgment as the last judgment that the ego gets to make before it dies! According to the Course, behind a person’s actions is only one of two operations: to love or to call for love. When we come against attacks, it means it’s time for less judgment, more surrendering, and more loving (even if the recipient is only ourselves).

As I’ve been tricked by my ego many times, I like to keep this reminder close at bay: if we are frustrated by someone else’s identification with their ego, that is, their attachment to guilt, fear, projection, and attack, then it is because we have not completely forgiven ourselves.

4. Knowledge is certainty; all else is perception

A while back, I wrote a blog article exploring why academia is a disempowering place despite the notion that knowledge is power. After studying ACIM, I have an even clearer understanding of why. It is because our guilt-based world has inverted the truth about knowledge.

We seek knowledge, usually through empirical means, to convince ourselves that what we know is certain. But the reality is all that we seek to know is just a matter of perception. According to ACIM, knowledge is always true and truth does not need to be proven. Since the opposite of guilt is innocence (in the rulings of the court), true knowledge that is ego-less (and therefore, guilt-free) is always innocent.

5. We learn what we teach

In ACIM, we are simultaneously students and teachers. Since our perception has not reached the level of truth, we come closer to knowledge through experience. We teach by example and simultaneously learn by living and teaching what we want to acquire. As the Course notes, “To have peace, teach peace to learn it.”

Another way I interpret this is through Heidegger's explanation of truth being a process of unconcealing. As human beings, we forget the spiritual truth we "know" when we are "thrown into" the world, so we embark on a journey of unconcealing the layers that veil the essence of our Being.

6. True empathy is not a joining of suffering

ACIM explains that to share suffering is to follow the ego’s path of separation. Joining another in suffering creates a special relationship that separates itself from the whole. This strengthens the ego and makes the past real as the shared unit attacks "others" in their weakness. True empathy, on the other hand, strengthens the empathizer and the collective whole (because we are one of the same). This empathy does not judge through the ego, and therefore, is an invitation made by Spirit to respond to a situation in a certain way.

As an empath, this lesson is encouraging but challenging. In a world of injustice, it's difficult to choose to stand in the awareness that "sovereignty" is more loving and empowering than "solidarity." Not only do we feel the pain, we are constantly asked to join in the suffering to prove our empathy or else risk being attacked with the sufferer's projected guilt. But this is the test of our knowledge: we know we are guilt-free and our act of service will manifest in our lives when we surrender.

7. There is no order of difficulty in miracles

On April 8, 2024, I had plans to see the Great North American Eclipse with a friend in the Hamilton area. Just as I was making my way onto the packed commuter train from Toronto, my friend texted me to ask if I wanted to abort mission because of the heavy clouds. I texted back to say that I wanted to take the chance. When I reached our meet up location, the sky was still completely overcast. Yet, something in me knew that we were going to see the eclipse (even if my mind couldn’t predict the future).

I didn’t tell my friend about my intuitive premonition, but I told her that I had recently finished reading ACIM and there was no order of difficulty in miracles. Low and behold, by the time we reached our destination, a place serendipitously called Groundhog Hill, the sky had completely cleared up and we were able to see our shadows under a sun that was beginning to be eclipsed by the moon.

I love the memory of this story because it is fuel for the dreamer in me. It reminds that there is really no miracle too large to witness. If the clouds can be moved out of the way for us to witness the miracle of a cosmic event, who is to say that a stubborn mind cannot be budged, or a locked-up heart cannot be freed? As ACIM says, “all expressions of love are maximal...There is no order of difficulty among miracles.”

The Little Prince (1943) is one of my all time favourite books, but honestly, I didn’t feel much for it the first time I read it. It was only when I got older and had developed a deeper awareness for pain that I started to like the book more and more. Although it’s marketed as a children’s book, in my opinion, it is truly a book for adults. Specifically, it is a book for the adult who is searching for their inner child who had been lost and abandoned in an unforgiving adult world.

Supposedly, The Little Prince was written while Saint-Exupéry was severely depressed and in exile in the US. So, it is clear that the book is symbolic of his yearning for his inner child and the part of himself who wanted innocence to prevail over the desolation of adulthood. However, it was a scene at the ending of his memoir Wind, Sand and Stars (1939) that revealed to me how personal the Little Prince character was to the author’s outlook on life.

He concludes the memoir with ruminating thoughts of his time on a train full of impoverished Polish families who were being sent back home after working and residing in France. In front of him was an adorable young boy. He first imagines the “beautiful promise” life would give to the boy if he were to be protected like the “little princes in legends” or the roses that are tended to in a garden. But then, he resigns to the melancholic reality that “this little Mozart” would be condemned to the “stamping machine” of society.

In contrast, the ending of The Little Price is ambiguous. The prince dies, according to many theories, by suicide with the help of the snake. In other interpretations, he returns home in spirit. In parallel, Saint-Exupéry, also disappeared in a plane crash (presumably) a year after the book was published. Neither the prince's nor the author’s bodies were found in each of their worlds. So, what is the ultimate truth? Did they actually die?

The Little Prince has sold over 200 million copies worldwide. It is the most translated book after the Bible. Adaptations, quotes, images, and merchandise related to the story are cherished all over the world. So, in many ways “invisible to the eye,” the Little Prince and Saint-Exupéry lives on. We may not recognize it, but innocence has already prevailed over desolation. We just have to prove it to ourselves by protecting the little prince and his rose inside each of us so to not let the machine of a dispirited culture take away from our beautiful future.