The spiritual teaching known as A Course in Miracles, or ACIM, is gaining momentum as a major movement in our time. It is a self-study curriculum for transforming the mind that is said to have been channeled from Jesus through an "internal teacher." The set of three volumes, consisting of the Text, Workbook for Students and Manual for Teachers, has gained wide popularity as a result of the writings on attitudinal healing by Jerry Jampolsky and others, and the bestselling books of Marianne Williamson and Iyanla Vanzant. The ACIM movement is also influenced by the ecumenical work of Unity Churches and the philosophies of New Thought metaphysics and perennial philosophy.
The Course teaches that universal love and peace can be attained by undoing guilt through forgiveness. It presents a different vision of reality, one that includes the idea that the universe is made up of a single eternally loving Creator God. It explains that the real world, which reflects this unified vision, is not a place of conflict, fear and death but one of harmony, love and abundance. Its unified vision is seen in the everyday world as well, where love replaces fear and forgiveness becomes the means of changing everything.
In his book A Course in Miracles Review, David Miller gives a substantive and illuminating overview of this movement. He addresses the various facets of the philosophy, teachings and practice of the Course, including its use of Christian terminology, its underlying ontology, and its appeal to a broad range of spiritual traditions. He provides detailed discussions of the Course's teaching on such topics as the illusory nature of the ego-self, the power of love and forgiveness to change reality, and living in an illusory world.
Miller's analysis is based on a A course in miracles review careful reading of the three volumes of the Course, as well as the question-and-answer format of the Manual for Teachers. He also draws on his experience as a student and teacher of the Course, his understanding of its history, and his evaluations of the writings that have been made about it by both secular and spiritual writers.
In 1976 Helen Schucman, a clinical psychologist at Columbia University, began receiving inner dictation that she believed was from Jesus Christ. She would not allow any knowledge of her eight-year involvement with this project to become public until after her death in 1981. The dictation was eventually published as A Course in Miracles, and within a decade it had been embraced in thousands of study groups and is now widely used throughout the world. A separate version of the Course, known as the CIMS edition, was edited by Ken Wapnick, who claims that he removed about a quarter of the material from the first five chapters of the Text and reorganized the remaining material, which was copyrighted by FIP in 1992 as A Course in Miracles: The CIMS Original Edition. The CIMS edition has not been widely available, however, due to copyright infringement concerns and disputes between a group of Course students and teachers who believe that the CIMS original edition should be in the public domain.