One Way A Course in Miracles Works

The question was: what am I?*

Reading and studying – taking, say – A Course in Miracles was basically a way of organizing my thinking with respect to answering that question. Naturally, it eventually became a way of gathering with those who were also using it to organize their own thinking with respect to answering that question.

So in a sense the course was basically a way of reifying thought itself, under the guise of shifting the contents of thought, without actually answering (or even addressing, really) the question.

That is incoherent.

You could imagine someone who is hungry, and who knows she must prepare a meal, and who opens the cupboard and begins moving the ingredients around without actually cooking. Perhaps if the flour is on the top shelf and the sugar on the bottom . . . Perhaps if the salt is placed in a position of prominence . . .

But never any bread. Never any soup.

Eventually it was clear this shifting, this organizing (and corresponding reification of incoherence) was not an answer to the question but rather the question from another perspective, which is to say, the same old question still unanswered.

But also, it is good to be clear about that, and one can be grateful to the context within which clarity dawns, without confusing that context for the light itself. Indeed, that is one way A Course in Miracles works.

That is coherent.

* Well, there were lots of questions, but they were mostly neatly helpfully included within that question. That question is actually not that hard to answer, especially once a) the need to reframe it becomes obvious and b) the ability to reframe is assumed (or remembered, maybe, or recalled even).