In this School For A Course In Miracles (SFACIM) video conversation, we read and examined portions of the Workbook of A Course In Miracles with generous help from Volume 4 of Kenneth Wapnick’s JTTW (Journey Through The Workbook of a Course In Miracles 8-volume set).
In A Course In Miracles there are:
- 1865 instances of mind! Wow! Hardly a minor topic! … However, there are only
- 9 instances of mind-wandering specifically … although the whole Course could easily be seen as a curriculum for undoing our prodigal wandering minds!
The first instance of the latter term is here:
“The correction of fear is your responsibility. When you ask for release from fear, you are implying that it is not. You should ask, instead, for help in the conditions that have brought the fear about. These conditions always entail a willingness to be separate. At that level you can help it. You are much too tolerant of mind-wandering, and are passively condoning your mind’s miscreations. The particular result does not matter, but the fundamental error does. The correction is always the same. Before you choose to do anything, ask me if your choice is in accord with mine. If you are sure that it is, there will be no fear.” (ACIM, T-2.VI.4:1-10)
We seem to have massively wandered from Perfect Oneness, yet our beloved Course’s first principle is that “There is no order of difficulty in miracles. (ACIM, T-1.I.1:1). This is true, no matter how bleak and hopeless our “lost” state might seem to be. Since we never left our Source, returning is only an imaginary journey, yet one we find more comfortable to make at our own very slow pace, rather than at a “snap of a finger” which might be interpreted incorrectly as a fearful experience. When insanity is the default state of mind…
“They are already in a fear-weakened state. If they are prematurely exposed to a miracle, they may be precipitated into panic. This is likely to occur when upside-down perception has induced the belief that miracles are frightening.” (ACIM, T-2.IV.4:8-10)
We then reviewed these two lessons that comprise review lesson 146:
“My mind holds only what I think with God.
The Course uses metaphors of the vertical (“undo” correction) and horizontal (ego idiocy of fussing over trivial differences in dream options).
We referenced Ken Wapnick’s (FACIM) workshop on “The Mind’s the Thing,” which relates nicely to our conversation. The liner notes for this audio program reinforce the Course’s persistent, gentle, patient prescription for consistent mindfulness:
“The focus of this program is on the primacy of the mind in both the ego’s and Holy Spirit’s plans of salvation. To the ego, salvation rests on denying the mind and its power, making the Son of God mindless; to the Holy Spirit, salvation comes through the practice of forgiveness, wherein we recognize the ego’s strategy and reverse it so that we can return to the mind and choose again.”
It’s always essential to work on the level of cause rather than effect, avoiding level confusion:
“It is pointless to believe that controlling the outcome of misthought can result in healing. ²When you are fearful, you have chosen wrongly. ³That is why you feel responsible for it. ⁴You must change your mind, not your behavior, and this is a matter of willingness. ⁵You do not need guidance except at the mind level. ⁶Correction belongs only at the level where change is possible. ⁷Change does not mean anything at the symptom level, where it cannot work.” (ACIM, T-2.VI.3:1-7)
Here are more related posts on this website that address level confusion; reversing cause and effect or mixing levels is a widespread, ubiquitous ego strategy to keep us mindless.
Here are the first 3 paragraphs of Lesson 131: “No one can fail who seeks to reach the truth.” (ACIM, W-131):
“Failure is all about you while you seek for goals that cannot be achieved.You look for permanence in the impermanent, for love where there is none, for safety in the midst of danger; immortality within the darkness of the dream of death.Who could succeed where contradiction is the setting of his searching, and the place to which he comes to find stability?
Goals that are meaningless are not attained. There is no way to reach them, for the means by which you strive for them are meaningless as they are. Who can use such senseless means, and hope through them to gain in anything? Where can they lead? And what could they achieve that offers any hope of being real? Pursuit of the imagined leads to death because it is the search for nothingness, and while you seek for life you ask for death. You look for safety and security, while in your heart you pray for danger and protection for the little dream you made.
Yet searching is inevitable here.For this you came, and you will surely do the thing you came for. But the world can not dictate the goal for which you search, unless you give it power to do so. Otherwise, you still are free to choose a goal that lies beyond the world and every worldly thought, and one that comes to you from an idea relinquished yet remembered, old yet new; an echo of a heritage forgot, yet holding everything you really want.”
Truth is formless and changeless, so returning to it is (happily) inevitable when we realize that the changeable form-bound identities we made up are “radar blip wannabes” that have never registered in eternity, and everything we made up involving space, time, form, and materiality has not (and cannot) compromise our eternal, all-inclusive, indivisible, inseparable, innocent being shared by all.
Every specific thing we made up is the “mathematically perfect classroom” when given to our Inner Kindness Teacher (Holy Spirit) for correction that helps us undo our belief in duality, multiplicity, confusion, and every permutation of the silly idea of guilt.
Every specific thing we use for the Holy Spirit’s purpose is essential and successful; every specific thing we use for the ego’s purpose is non-essential and a failure to accept the sane correction of mind-wandering. This isn’t a suggestion to indulge in guilt, but just the opposite; when we notice we’ve meandered away from peace, the most loving, kind thing we can do is to make a mental bee-line back to serene sanity ASAP!
The first 3 paragraphs of Lesson 132 – “I loose the world from all I thought it was.” (ACIM, W-132) are:
“What keeps the world in chains but your beliefs? And what can save the world except your Self? Belief is powerful indeed. The thoughts you hold are mighty, and illusions are as strong in their effects as is the truth. A madman thinks the world he sees is real, and does not doubt it. Nor can he be swayed by questioning his thoughts’ effects. It is but when their source is raised to question that the hope of freedom comes to him at last.
Yet is salvation easily achieved, for anyone is free to change his mind, and all his thoughts change with it. Now the source of thought has shifted, for to change your mind means you have changed the source of all ideas you think or ever thought or yet will think. You free the past from what you thought before. You free the future from all ancient thoughts of seeking what you do not want to find.
The present now remains the only time. Here in the present is the world set free. For as you let the past be lifted and release the future from your ancient fears, you find escape and give it to the world. You have enslaved the world with all your fears, your doubts and miseries, your pain and tears; and all your sorrows press on it, and keep the world a prisoner to your beliefs. Death strikes it everywhere because you hold the bitter thoughts of death within your mind.”
When we question ego’s false premise of unworthiness and inadequacy, we loosen our identification with the core of the thought system that must project its foundation of sin, guilt, and fear, repress the horror of it, project it onto the world, and then perceive the insanity outside of us.
“To learn this course requires willingness to question every value that you hold. Not one can be kept hidden and obscure, but it will jeopardize your learning. No belief is neutral. Every one has the power to dictate each decision you make. For a decision is a conclusion based on everything that you believe. It is the outcome of belief, and follows it as surely as does suffering follow guilt and freedom sinlessness. There is no substitute for peace. What God creates has no alternative. The truth arises from what He knows. And your decisions come from your beliefs as certainly as all creation rose in His Mind because of what He knows.” (ACIM, T-24.in.2:1-10)
The state of our body is irrelevant to our peace of mind. This wonderfully radical idea helps us loosen the tenacious ego grip on its version of “reality” – its propaganda insists bodies are our identity. The Course doesn’t ask us to deny our experience of being in a body; it merely asks us if we would be more peaceful if we questioned the ego’s interpretation of our bodies … and everything in the material universe!
“The miracle minimizes the need for time. In the longitudinal or horizontal plane the recognition of the equality of the members of the Sonship appears to involve almost endless time. However, the miracle entails a sudden shift from horizontal to vertical perception. This introduces an interval from which the giver and receiver both emerge farther along in time than they would otherwise have been. The miracle thus has the unique property of abolishing time to the extent that it renders the interval of time it spans unnecessary. There is no relationship between the time a miracle takes and the time it covers. The miracle substitutes for learning that might have taken thousands of years. It does so by the underlying recognition of perfect equality of giver and receiver on which the miracle rests. The miracle shortens time by collapsing it, thus eliminating certain intervals within it. It does this, however, within the larger temporal sequence.” (ACIM, T-1.II.6:1-10)
As Ken points out, the two ancient ideas (that we’re still participating in) are the separation (insanity) and the Atonement (the sane correction). If I think I’m separate (from anyone or anything), I’m resurrecting ancient insanity instead of using forgiveness in the present to undo this crazy belief, founded on unfounded unworthiness and a deceiving, despicable self-concept, all based on a faulty assumption of an impossible crime.
“At no single instant does the body exist at all. It is always remembered or anticipated, but never experienced just now. Only its past and future make it seem real. Time controls it entirely, for sin is never wholly in the present. In any single instant the attraction of guilt would be experienced as pain and nothing else, and would be avoided. It has no attraction now. Its whole attraction is imaginary, and therefore must be thought of in the past or in the future.” (ACIM, T-18.VII.3:1-7)
(This conversation was facilitated by Bruce Rawles as part of the School For A Course In Miracles (SFACIM) curriculum hosted by Lyn Corona and Tim Wise. This YouTube video recording was made on Tuesday, May 26, 2026.)
