Key Concepts and Terms Articles

You pick up this strange book called A Course in Miracles. How, you wonder, can a book teach you to perform miracles? Then you open the cover and find, to your relief, that the very first section contains fifty miracle principles. Surely these principles will clarify...

What we do to block the holy instant, and how to get out of the way. The holy instant is an experience of grace, an instant in which we set aside some or all of our identification with the ego and our belief in the reality of the world it has projected, and allow the...

Note: I finished this piece as the San Bernardino shooting was unfolding. While it is not directly related to that event, I think its message of the importance of gratitude for God's gifts (including the love that even our brothers' attacks can awaken in us) may be...

I've always been fascinated by the placebo effect: the phenomenon in medicine where people can experience healing benefits from a fake medicine if they believe the medicine is real. How is it that a sugar pill can be equally or even more effective than an actual...

We Course students spend a lot of time looking at our egos and getting in touch with the darkness of the ego's world. This is vital work; as the Course says, "No one can escape from illusions unless he looks at them, for not looking is the way they are protected"...

If you follow sports at all, you know that this week, the Boston Red Sox won their second World Series in four years. This is an amazing turnaround for a team that until 2004 had not won a championship in eighty-six years—a streak of futility that fans dubbed "the...

An unexpected development in book publishing recently has been the popularity of a group of authors dubbed the "New Atheists," unabashed nonbelievers taking passionate aim at religious faith. Sam Harris got the ball rolling with his bestseller The End of Faith, and...

Reflections on Matthieu Ricard's Altruism and the Debate about Human Nature I've recently finished reading an excellent book called Altruism: The Power of Compassion to Change Yourself and the World. This book by a French Buddhist monk named Matthieu Ricard offers a...

One of the most radical teachings of A Course in Miracles is that "It is your thoughts alone that cause you pain" (W-pI.190.5:1), and the joy of God is the only thing that's real. This sounds wonderful in theory, since it offers us the possibility of exchanging pain...

Especially in these difficult economic times, all of us hope to acquire enough to make ends meet. Of course, we would love to do better than that; if we had enough money and material things to not just get by but live comfortably, surely we would be happy with what we...

In the early dictation of A Course in Miracles, the miracle is depicted as an “expression of love” extended by a miracle worker to a miracle receiver, an expression that often takes the form of a seemingly small act of kindness. This expression of love heals the mind...

The past ten years or so have seen a spate of books and self-help gurus promoting the attainment of permanent happiness. But according to a recent article in Newsweek by Sharon Begley entitled "Happiness: Enough Already," there has lately been a backlash against the...