A Course in Miracles: Based on the Original Handwritten Notes of Helen Schucman—Complete & Annotated Edition

by Helen Schucman

3The ego resents everything it does not control. 4Control is a central factor in what the ego permits into consciousness, and one to which it devotes its maximum vigilance. 5This is not the way a balanced mind holds together. 6Its control is unconscious.

4The body is the ego’s home by its own election. 5It is the only identification with which it feels safe, because the body’s vulnerability is its own best argument that you cannot be of God.

This is the question which must be asked: “Where can I go for protection?” 2Only an insane mind fails to ask it.

5They still search for many gods simultaneously, and this goal confusion, especially given a very strong will, must produce chaotic behavior. 9 Others have behavior that is not chaotic, because they are not so much goal-divided as not goal-oriented. 2Where the first kind have overinvested in many goals, this second kind have underinvested in all goals. 3They have the advantage of potentially greater freedom from distractibility, but they do not always care enough to use it. 4The first kind have the advantage of exerting great effort, but they keep losing sight of the goal. 10 It would be very intelligent of you to set yourself the goal of really studying for this course. 2There can be no doubt of the wisdom of this decision, for any student who wants to pass it. 3But, knowing your individual weaknesses as a learner and being a teacher with some experience, I must remind you that learning and wanting to learn are inseparable.

It is noticeable that in all these diversionary tactics, the one question which is never asked by those who pursue them is “What for?” 2This is the question which you must learn to ask in connection with everything your mind wills to undertake. 3What is your purpose? 4Whatever it is, you cannot doubt that it will channelize your efforts automatically. 5When you make a decision of purpose, then, you have made a decision about future effort, a decision which will remain in effect unless you change the decision.

You cannot escape from the ego by humbling it or controlling it or punishing it.

2Your mission is very simple: You have been chosen to live so as to demonstrate that you are not an ego.

5Your gratitude to your brother is the only gift I want. 6I will bring it to God for you, knowing that to know your brother is to know God.

A little knowledge is an all-encompassing thing.91 2If you are grateful to your brother you are grateful to God for what He created. 3Through your gratitude you can come to know your brother, and one moment of real recognition makes all men your brothers92 because they are all of your Father. 4Love does not conquer all things, but it does set all things right.

Do not disturb yourself about repression, but do train yourself to be alert to any tendency to withdraw from your brothers.

3You are afraid of all complete involvements, and believe that they lessen you.

5As you come closer to a brother you do approach me, and as you withdraw from him I become distant to you.

4Meditation is a collaborative venture with God. 5It cannot be undertaken successfully by those who disengage themselves from the Sonship, because they are disengaging themselves from me. 6God will come to you only as you will give Him to your brothers. 7Learn first of them, and you will be ready to hear God as you hear them. 8That is because the function of love is one.

How can you teach someone the value of something he has thrown away deliberately? 2He must have thrown it away because he did not value it. 3You can only show him how miserable he is without it and bring it near very slowly, so he can learn how his misery lessens as he approaches it. 4This conditions him to associate his misery with its absence, and to associate the opposite of misery with its presence. 5It gradually becomes desirable, as he changes his mind about its worth.

You should be confident that any guidance which comes from me will not jeopardize anyone. 2If you can continue not to evaluate my messages and merely follow them, they will lead to good for everyone. 3Since this is the same area of difficulty which may be causing you trouble with meditation, practice in this is essential.

3There are miracles that should be offered to particular people today, and I will tell you specifically, in answer to your asking, who these people are.

2Nothing that is real can be increased except by sharing it. 3That is why God Himself created you.

4Divine Abstraction takes joy in application, and this is what creation means.

God is praised whenever any mind learns to be wholly helpful.

2This is impossible without being wholly harmless, because the two beliefs must coexist.

3The truly helpful are invulnerable, because they are not protecting their egos, so t...

That is really why you recoil from the demands of the dependent and from the sight of a broken body. 2Your ego is threatened, and blocks your natural impulse to help, placing you under the strain of divided will. 3You withdraw to allow your ego to recover, and to regain enough strength to be helpful again on a basis limited enough not to threaten your ego, but also too limited to give you joy.

2I am here only to be truly helpful. 3I am here to represent Him Who sent me. 4I do not have to worry about what to say or what to do, because He Who sent me will direct me. 5I am content to be wherever He wishes, knowing He goes there with me. 6I will be healed as I let Him teach me to heal.

The term “last foolish journey” suggests that the crucifixion on the outside was yet another repetition of the ego’s natural cycle, which ends in death (see next paragraph). Yet on the inside Jesus had left behind the ego, the very thing that generated those repetitions. So for him it was the last such repetition. And if we can view the crucifixion as he does, it can be the last one for us, too.

In the above passage, we feel the compulsion to repeat the trauma of the separation and its aftereffects, which culminate in death.

The “pleasure principle” is what drives the id. The id seeks immediate gratification of the basic urges of sex, anger, hunger, and thirst. The above reference, however, claims that the real pleasure we are seeking is the filling of our ego’s lack of reality. This lack is the “scarcity principle,” which Jesus is putting forward in this section as the real driving force of the ego.

Hebrews 13:5 (RSV): “Keep your life free from love of money, and be content with what you have; for he has said, ‘I will never fail you nor forsake you.’”

Anxiety appears to come from the capriciousness of external events, from their unpredictability. But it really comes from the unpredictability of our own ego. We are anxious because we do not know what destructive thing our ego will do next.

A reference to perpetual motion machines, hypothetical devices that are able to run continuously by producing more energy than they consume. Such machines are believed to be impossible in terms of our current understanding of physics, yet the pursuit of them remains popular. Jesus’ point is that they represent a kind of pseudo-eternity, a reduction of the eternal to the unimportant.

In the Course, the focus is on us repressing our truly natural impulse to extend love.

To offer rehabilitation, as defined by this section, is to help those who seem to be weakened and damaged by offering them genuine love, based on an attitude of praising the perfection God created in them.

2Thoughts increase by being given away. 3The more who believe in them, the stronger they become. 4Everything is an idea. 5How, then, is it possible that giving and losing can be meaningfully associated?

The Holy Spirit is the Mind of the Atonement. 2He represents a state of mind that comes close enough to one-mindedness that transfer is at last possible. 3As psychologists know, transfer depends on common elements in the old learning and the new situation to which the learning transferred.12 4Perception is not knowledge, but it can be transferred to knowledge, or cross over into it. 5It might even be more helpful here to use the literal meaning “carried over,” for the last step is taken by God.13

The Holy Spirit is the motivation for miracle-mindedness, the will to heal the separation by letting it go.

4That is why you can choose to listen to two voices within you. 5One you made yourself, and that one is not of God. 6But the other is given you by God, Who asks you only to listen to It. 7The Holy Spirit is in you in a very literal sense. 8He is the Voice that calls you back to where you were before and will be again.

It is possible even in this world to hear only that Voice and no other. 2It takes effort and great willingness to learn. 3It is the final lesson that I learned, and God’s Sons are as equal as learners as they are as Sons. 4The voice of the Holy Spirit is the call to Atonement, or the restoration of the integrity of the mind. 5When the Atonement is complete and the whole Sonship is healed, there will be no call to return.

The Call to return is stronger than the call to depart, but it speaks in a different way. 2The voice of the Holy Spirit does not command, because it is incapable of arrogance. 3It does not demand, because it does not seek control. 4It does not overcome, because it does not attack. 5It merely reminds. 6It is compelling only because of what it reminds you of. 7It brings to your mind the other way, remaining quiet even in the midst of the turmoil you have made for yourself. 5 The Voice for God is always quiet, because it speaks of peace. 2Yet peace is stronger than war, because it heals. 3War is division, not increase. 4No one gains from strife. 5“What profiteth a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul?”23 6This means that if he listens to the wrong voice, he has lost sight of his soul. 7He cannot lose it, but he can not know it. 8It is therefore lost to him, until he chooses right.

2We have already said that the Holy Spirit is the bridge or thought-transfer of perception to knowledge,35 so we can use the terms as if they were related, because in His Mind they are.

Since thoughts do not have to be conscious to exist, your brother does not have to be aware of the Holy Spirit, either in himself or in you, for this miracle to occur. 2He may have dissociated the Call for God, just as you have. 3But the dissociation is healed in both of you as you see the Call in him and thus acknowledge Its being.

If you say of a brother that you are determined “not to see him that way,” you are speaking negatively.37 2But if the same idea is stated positively, you can see the power of it.

7Stated positively, you will see him through the Holy Spirit in your mind and perceive the Holy Spirit in his.

2You have made the mistake of looking for the Holy Spirit in yourself, and that is why your meditations may have frightened you.40 3By adopting the ego’s viewpoint, you undertook an ego-alien journey with the ego as guide.41 4This was bound to produce fear. 5The better idea of perceiving the Holy Spirit in your brother needs to be strengthened in both you and him. 6You can increase this idea by giving it to him.

8The ego becomes strong in strife, because if you believe there is strife, you will react viciously because the idea of danger has entered your mind.

The separation is merely another term for a split mind. 2It was not an act but a thought. 3Therefore, the idea of separation can be given away just as the idea of unity can, and either way it will be strengthened in the mind of the giver. 4The ego is the symbol of the separation, just as the Holy Spirit is the symbol of peace. 5What you perceive in others you are strengthening in yourself.

I have saved all of your kindnesses and every loving thought you have had, and I assure you that you have had many. 2I have purified them of errors which hid their light, and have kept them for you in their own perfect radiance. 3They are beyond destruction and beyond guilt. 4They came from the Holy Spirit within you, and we know that what God creates is eternal.

3But the Holy Spirit will not fail to help you reinterpret everything that you perceive as fearful, and teach you that only what is loving is true.

Turning the other cheek does not mean that you should submit to violence without protest.57 2It means that you cannot be hurt, and do not want to show your brother anything except your wholeness. 3Show him that he cannot hurt you, and hold nothing against him, or you hold it against yourself.

6In fact, you do not want to keep him. 7You must learn to see him as he is and know that he belongs to God, as you do.

Ideas do not leave the mind which thought them in order to have separate being.

How can you who are so holy suffer? 2All your past except its beauty is gone, and nothing is left but a blessing. 3You can indeed depart in peace,64 because I have loved you as I love myself.65 4You go with my blessing and for my blessing. 5Hold it and share it, that it may always be ours. 6I place the peace of God in your heart and in your hands, to hold and share. 7The heart is pure to hold it, and the hands are strong to give it. 8We cannot lose. 9My judgment is as strong as the wisdom of God, in Whose heart and hands we have our being.66 10His quiet children are His blessed Sons. 11The thoughts of God are with you.