Metaphysics Articles

By my count, there are five passages in the Urtext (the original typescript of the Course) in which the Course talks about the world in a seemingly different sense than the later Course. It talks about the world as created by God. Four of these five passages have been...

A Dialogue Between Jim Marion and Robert Perry In November of 2004, Jim Marion, author of The Death of the Mythic God: The Rise of Evolutionary Spirituality and Putting on the Mind of Christ: The Inner Work of Christian Spirituality, wrote me about his reactions to...

This comes from a dialogue I've been having with my friend Gerald Emerald of Prescott, Arizona on the subject of duality and nonduality. It was my attempt to summarize the Course's position on nonduality and the essential perspective we had both agreed on. Dualism...

I wanted to share something I've been chewing on. It's theoretical but I also find it practical. It's basically a single idea that kills a number of birds, so to speak, at once. I'll first develop the single idea in a series of brief points and then explain the idea...

A transcription from “Walk You in Glory,” a workshop on self-esteem presented by Robert Perry in Sedona, AZ in February 2003. Imagine that you have contracted a really weird disease, unlike anything you have ever heard of. This is how it progresses: First, you notice...

The question of how the world began and who made it is one of the central issues for students of A Course in Miracles. What student hasn’t wrestled with this issue? How many of us have tried on various positions on the origin of the world, trying to settle down on...

The other day, a friend asked me if I could find those passages in the Course that talk of us being able to send miracles backward in time. It's a fascinating topic, one that at first seems impossible. I mean, the past has already happened, right? And whenever you...

When A Course in Miracles says that the world is an illusion or that we made the world, what does it mean by "world"? Does it mean the actual physical world seen by our eyes, or does it mean "the world as we see it"? Obviously, depending on how we interpret "world,"...

The idea of hell has a strong hold on the human imagination. Virtually every religious tradition has some version of it. In the West, even people who have never been inside a church are familiar with the traditional image of hell as a fiery, underground abode where...

I'm sorry for not getting this summary up quicker (and now I discover I forgot to categorize it, making it basically invisible!). Because of Rich Murray's very kind offer to produce a transcript of the class, I'll just summarize my major points. Discussion, as always,...

One of the paradoxes in the Course that is hard for us to wrap our heads around is how the Course wants us to see ourselves. It wants us to see ourselves as divine, at one with and even equal to God, and it wants us to see ourselves as human in the most fallible...