Exploring A Course in Miracles

When it comes to the topic of specialness, the Course is challenging something in us that we have hoped to keep forever hidden and safely undisturbed. The goal to achieve “special favor”, the Course says, is what originally drove the separation and it’s what drives us now – to disastrous effect. Accordingly, the reason we all hide our quest for specialness, even from ourselves, is the very reason we need to give it up: Specialness puts us at war with all our brothers. It therefore makes us fundamentally alone. In this episode, Robert and Emily have a very candid discussion on facing our addiction to being special - human race’s guilty secret—and how we can let go of this need in recognition of our equal holiness and worth.

Contemporary spirituality constantly tells us that we have to get out of our mind and into our heart. We hear again and again that in order to spiritually awaken we need to “turn off our thinking” and enter into being. A Course in Miracles, however, teaches that sound reasoning is not the enemy of spiritual development, but rather a central tool in the process. In this episode, Robert and Emily discuss why the Course considers logic and reason among the most powerful means we have for dispelling ego-based emotions that seem to have us in their grip.

Monastics are defined in part by their withdrawal from ordinary society as well as by such outer things as distinctive clothing, specific daily schedules, special diet, and other symbolic accoutrements. Yet if we set aside these forms of difference, monasticism has more in common with the Course than you might suspect. The driving force behind monasticism is that it shoots for the highest spiritual attainment possible. Further, it recognizes that this spiritual summit is so valuable, so precious, that the climb deserves all of us—-heart, mind, body and soul. In this episode of Exploring A Course in Miracles, Robert Perry and Emily Bennington discuss how we can use the discipline and structure of monastics as a model and an inspiration for our own practice everyday.

If the title of this article strikes you as odd, you are not alone. People familiar with A Course in Miracles don't usually think in terms of its social vision. Doesn't the Course urge us to "seek not to change the world"? Isn't our sole responsibility to accept the Atonement for ourselves? Isn't the Course strictly about how we perceive the world in our own minds? We at the Circle have been arguing for years that the Course is deeply concerned with our role in uplifting the world, and that it even sees us carrying out this role through a great deal of "busy doing". In this episode of Exploring A Course in Miracles, Robert Perry and Emily Bennington discuss how we can use our own lives to become an “oasis in the desert” and achieve Jesus’ vision of social change.

We are living through an unprecedented moment in history. It’s a moment where pockets of the world have been willing to finally look at the gaping wound of racism and what it’s doing to us. As Americans, we know this wound is a central part our origin story but what feels different about this time is the degree to which those who are outside the black the community are willing to not only examine white privilege, but willing to examine its contribution to the dishonoring and disenfranchisement of our black brothers and sisters. This includes acknowledging the ways in which contributions from the black community to so much of what we take for granted, and so much of what we consider sacred, have been undervalued and unappreciated. The movie “Hidden Figures” captured this concept in the story of three black women who were behind very successful missions at NASA, and whose stories were not widely known until recently. A Course in Miracles has its own “hidden figure” and that’s what we talk about in this episode of Exploring A Course in Miracles with our guest Freedom Cartwright. All of us at the Circle wish to thank Freedom and Laura Yates Campoli for their dedication to bringing this story to light.

Given how persistent and formative childhood wounds can be, unearthing them can seem to be the way to explain who we are now. The early dictation of the Course addressed this issue at some length, as it turns outs, and the perspective that emerges is one that you might find surprising. Join Robert and Emily for a lively discussion of how the Course would have us approach the healing of childhood wounds.

To a significant degree, the Course is resting the achievement of its goals on our repeating of its words. The Workbook, for example, opens by saying that "it is doing the exercises that will make the goal of the course possible" (W-pI.In.1:2) and each exercise includes some form of word repetition. In this episode of Exploring A Course in Miracles, Robert Perry and Emily Bennington discuss why this is the Course's main practice and how to claim the gift that its words contain for us.

As spiritual seekers, we tend to see our job as getting out of the way so that divine light can flood in and fill our awareness. Accordingly, we typically see the spiritual life as the process of becoming ever more receptive and surrendered. Yet there is also another side to our nature that is actively expressive and creative. In this episode of Exploring A Course in Miracles, Robert Perry and Emily Bennington dive into the fundamental urge in us to create - to take something valuable and precious inside us and express it on the outside – and why the Course says we are “unfulfilled” until we do.

Given that protection is on everyone’s minds these days, it makes sense to look into what A Course in Miracles has to say on the topic. How, according to the Course, can we find protection? It turns out that the Course mentions protection 237 times and that these references add up to a fascinating picture, one that turns our normal ideas of protection upside down. Join Circle of Atonement Founder Robert Perry and Executive Director Emily Bennington for a discussion where we can go for protection, which has our current challenges very much in mind.

What is the relationship between the victim and the victimizer in you? If you’re like most people, you may feel you only become defensive when you feel like a victim yourself. We, in other words, never attack first. In this episode of Exploring A Course in Miracles, Robert Perry and Emily Bennington discuss the Course’s (very different) approach to this topic, which many students find challenging at first - but in the end is quite liberating.