The Prayerful Practice of
Direct Communication with God
The Workbook of A Course in Miracles
The Workbook of A Course in Miracles propels you into conscious contact with universal mind, all that is – your Creator, God. It is your access to heaven.
As an awakening consciousness, you pick up the Workbook having already had some non-worldly experiences: “...[an] experience that is not of this world, which shows [you] that the world does not exist because what [you] behold must be the truth, and yet it clearly contradicts the world.”
...perhaps you will [go]… to the awareness of a blazing light
in which you recognize yourself as Love created you.
Reasonably you have figured out that something is desperately wrong with your existence. If there is a whole, loving God, how could there be pain, sickness, suffering and death? Perhaps you have tried various mind-training programs only to find that re-illusioning your human condition to have more of what you think you want and overcoming undesirable shortcomings, still dooms you to the eventual loss of everything you love and certain death.
In the quietness of your own mind, you have found that as an individual you don’t know who you are, where you came from or what you’re doing here. You also know within yourself that there is a whole, single, universal mind, a loving God. But you are trapped, seemingly without access to that loving God, within your construct of “you.” You have discovered that anything within your awareness will only keep your own individual historic references of separation. How futile!
[God] speaks from nearer than your heart to you.
His Voice is closer than your hand.
His Love is everything you are…
Finally, at a point of abject surrender, you call for help, for total help. The Workbook is the answer to that call. As a transformative prayer book, it is designed to inspire you and guide you in your passage from temporal existence to the awakening of your true identity as a perfect creation of the one single universal mind.
The first portion of the Workbook is an undoing. It begins to train your mind “in a systematic way to a different perception of everyone and everything in the world.” (W, the very first page) The awakening is spontaneous since the miracle does nothing. It happens not because you are doing the lessons, but because you are the lessons. The lessons are your personal, individual contact with reality. Therefore, the Workbook is your personal prayer book. Now you strive to stay in constant prayer – in contact with God.
...[remember] only how much you want to reach the light in you today, – now!
...you will begin to feel a sense of being lifted up and carried ahead...
God Himself will raise you from darkness into light.
The first lessons in the Workbook make some startling declarations about the apparent temporal objective reality of the intellectual human mind. No credit is given to the human condition at all. The horrible truth is dawning on you - you are in a world of your own making - and universal whole mind, God, your Creator, knows nothing of it.
Nothing I see… means anything.
I have given everything I see… all the meaning it has for me.
I do not understand anything I see in this room...
The point of the exercises is to help you clear your mind of all past associations...
These thoughts do not mean anything.
I am never upset for the reason I think.
I am upset because I see something that is not there.
I see only the past.
My mind is preoccupied with past thoughts. No one really sees anything.
He sees only his thoughts projected outward. The one wholly true thought
one can hold about the past is that it is not here.
The world you see has nothing to do with reality.
It is of your own making, and it does not exist.
The experience of the miracle is recognized in the holy instant which is the conversion and healing of your dark self-containment. Your fear of communication with reality disappears. Your mind is transforming and will continue naturally as long as you don’t interfere by reconfiguring a new belief system for yourself by studying your conflict and trying to press the universal Mind of God back into a conceptual framework.
Light – the Light of truth, not the light this world knows – begins to dawn on your awareness as vision takes the place of seeing as humans who are accustomed to physical sight.
You will begin to understand it when you have seen little edges of light around
the same familiar objects which you see now. That is the beginning of real vision…
As we go along, you may have many “light episodes.” They may take many different forms, some of them quite unexpected. Do not be afraid of them.
Why would you be afraid of wholeness? of love? of your Creator? Trapped in your own mind and committed to the belief system that keeps you recognizable to yourself, the last thing you want to do is surrender your control. And it is the last thing you do. Thus the emerging consciousness often attempts to “study” the Course and hold experience at bay.
Before the light you will receive today, the world will fade until it disappears,
and you will see another world arise you have no words to picture.
Now we walk directly into light...
This is the beginning of salvation: you are responsible for what you see. This world is only a projection of your own miscreated self-identity. You are hallucinating. And you must want to wake up. You must want to leave “all the foolish thoughts of the world.”You must want “earthly sounds [to] be quiet, and the sights to which [you are] accustomed [to] disappear.” You must want to “lay aside all thoughts of what you are and what God is… all images you hold about yourself.”
The second half of the Workbook deepens into a profound experience of your connection with your Creator.
We place faith in the experience that comes from practice, not the means we use.
We wait for the experience, and recognize that it is only here conviction lies.
This is not a course in philosophical speculation… A universal theology is impossible, but a universal experience is not only possible but necessary. It is this experience toward which the course is directed. Here alone consistency becomes possible
because here alone uncertainty ends.
...close your eyes upon the world you see, and in the silent darkness watch the lights that are not of this world light one by one, until where one begins another ends loses all meaning as they blend in one… the lights of Heaven bend to you.
Now you have dismissed the absurdity of being a self-created separated identity. You have accepted the possibility of a whole new reference point:
[Your] beliefs [are] so firmly fixed that it is difficult to help you see that they are based on nothing. That you have made mistakes is obvious. That you have sought salvation in strange ways; have been deceived, deceiving and afraid of foolish fantasies and savage dreams; and have bowed down to idols made of dust, - all this is true by what you now believe. Today we question this, not from the point of view of what you think, but from a very different reference point, from which such idle thoughts are meaningless.
Wow! No matter what you thought, you are simply wrong. The self that works on itself and examines itself does not exist. The Workbook is teaching you the atonement of your own mind, not some temporary relief of it through comparison to what you thought you were previously.
The self you made is not the Son of God. Therefore, this self does not exist at all.
And anything it seems to do and think means nothing. It is neither bad nor good.
It is unreal, and nothing more than that... The self you made, evil and full of sin,
is meaningless. Your sinlessness is guaranteed by God.
All you have ever done is demand recognition of your individual circumstances and memories. In doing that, you have maintained your own identity apart from God. You recognize, as your experience of the holy instant gathers momentum, that you were only inflicting pain upon yourself.
Angels light the way, so that all darkness vanishes, and you are standing in a light so bright and clear that you can understand all things you see. A tiny moment of surprise, perhaps, will make you pause before you realize the world you see before you in the light reflects the truth you knew, and did not quite forget in wandering away
in dreams.
The recognition that you were only inflicting pain on yourself will make you laugh. The whole universe is only your dream association! Now you are living in the moment; therefore you constantly release all your previous relationships without the necessity to predict or verify the results. Your mind has changed despite your intentions to stay in a relationship of time and space. It’s a miracle!
The cellular association that you maintain as a body separate from God, your brother, and everything, may begin to go through major shifts. The resurrection – the changing of the human mind to God Mind – is indeed physical. All your past memory associations that keep you “you,” fade.
And you who bring it light will come to see the light more sure; the vision more distinct. The time will come when you will not return in the same form in which
you now appear, for you will have no need of it.
If I so choose, I can depart this world entirely. It is not death which makes
this possible, but it is change of mind about the purpose of the world.