• The Illusion of Separation: Both traditions teach that the fundamental problem of human existence is the belief in separation from God or the Divine. ACIM states that separation is a dream-like error, while Sufism views multiplicity and ego-identity (nafs) as veils hiding the ultimate unity of reality (Tawhid) or Oneness of Being (Wahdat al-Wujud).
• Forgiveness and Inner Purification: ACIM centers its entire curriculum on forgiveness, which undoes the ego’s projections and grievances. Similarly, Sufism emphasizes tazkiya (purification of the heart) and the letting go of worldly illusions, anger, and egoic attachments so as to achieve spiritual clarity.
• Direct Experiential Knowledge: Both paths look past rigid external rules and dogmas to prioritize a direct, inner experience of the divine. Classical Sufism is the esoteric (bāṭin) heart of Islam, while universal Sufism is a resolute expression of the mystic heart of all the religions. For its part, ACIM operates as a self-study spiritual thought system that bypasses organized religious structures.
• Love as the Transforming Force: Both systems treat universal love as the ultimate healing power. Sufi poetry (like that of Rūmī, Hafez, and Ibn Arabi) famously portrays divine love (ishq) as the dissolver of all boundaries, echoing ACIM’s premise that love is the only reality and fear is its absence.
In A Course in Miracles, light is defined as “understanding.” To live in spiritual darkness is literally to “not understand.”
What is it we don’t understand? That what we see with our physical eyes is never the whole picture in a situation. The bodily level of things is rarely the ultimate reflection of what people are actually feeling and thinking. Our love, the essence of who we are, is often covered over by layers of fear, defensiveness, and emotional armor. To “see the light” is to understand that, to extend our perception beyond what the physical eyes can see to what the heart knows to be true.
That’s the real meaning of forgiveness: to recognize the light in someone, to remember who they really are, even when their mortal self is expressing fear. All of us are tempted to forget who we are sometimes, and through forgiveness we are reminded. In a space of misunderstanding, we can choose to understand.
If you’re ready to get serious and go deep, this seminar will help you. It begins on October 13 and you can learn more and register here. I hope you’ll join me. Come ready to change.
A tree that will not bend snaps in the first real storm. Reeds that bend all the way to the ground stand up again the moment the wind passes.
This chapter of the Tao Te Ching uses the body itself as evidence. A living person is soft, flexible, yielding to touch. A corpse is stiff, rigid, resistant to movement. Life, in this observation, is not defined by strength in the way most people define it. It’s defined by pliability. Rigidity is what death looks like, physically and metaphorically both, whether it’s showing up in a body or in a mind that has hardened into fixed positions it refuses to update.
This cuts hard against the instinct to treat strength as firmness, standing your ground, refusing to bend under any circumstance. That kind of strength works right up until it meets a force larger than itself, and then it doesn’t bend, it breaks, because it never developed the capacity to absorb pressure without shattering. Softness isn’t the absence of strength. It’s a different kind of strength, one that survives precisely because it never needed to prove it couldn’t be moved.
This applies as much to identity and belief as it does to trees and bodies. A person who cannot update their views when reality contradicts them isn’t strong. They’re brittle, waiting for the specific pressure that will finally break what refused to bend even slightly. A person who stays supple, willing to adjust, willing to be wrong, willing to move without losing themselves in the moving, is the one still standing long after the rigid position has cracked.
Nothing that refuses to bend survives long enough to see what comes next. Only what stays supple gets to keep growing.
If you want to awaken all of humanity, then awaken all of yourself. If you want to eliminate the suffering in the world, then eliminate all that is illusionary and negative in yourself. Truly, the greatest gift you have to give is that of your own self-transformation.
Notice as human beings eliminate the need for illusions within themselves, forces of illusion are neutralized throughout the world. This occurs as consciousness expands. Our personal renunciation of fear, doubt, negative thoughts, words and harmful acts is reflected in the perception and experience of greater harmony everywhere.
Every pilgrimage the seeker undertakes eventually leads back to the same starting point: the chest cavity they never left.
This is the central provocation of Sufi teaching, and it undermines almost every conventional approach to spiritual seeking. Pilgrims travel to distant shrines. Seekers search for masters in far countries. People spend decades looking for meaning in achievement, relationship, or recognition, external locations where they hope the sacred is waiting to be discovered. The Sufi masters insisted, repeatedly and without exception, that this entire structure of searching outward was built on a fundamental misunderstanding. What is sought was never elsewhere. The heart – the qalb – was always the location.
This is not a comforting platitude. It is a precise metaphysical claim. The qalb, in Sufi cosmology, is not the emotional heart of Western sentiment. It is the organ of spiritual perception, the seat where divine reality can be directly known, if it has been sufficiently polished of the veils that ordinary living accumulates over it: fear, ego, distraction, attachment to the temporary. The heart that has not been polished sees nothing when it looks inward, and so the seeker, mistaking their own unpolished condition for absence, keeps looking elsewhere.
This is why the entire discipline of the Sufi path – dhikr, remembrance, the systematic clearing of what obscures the heart – exists. Not to travel toward the divine, but to remove what prevents the divine already present from being recognized. The pilgrimage was never geographic. It was always a movement inward, toward what had never actually left.
What you have been seeking in the world was waiting in your chest before you ever started the search.
What is the character of the Sufi message? The core of it, of course, is mysticism. As a realized mystic, looking at Western culture, what Inayat Khan was destined to do was to open a path to inner realization that so many in the West could not find anymore. He was inspired to invoke the mysteries and the beauty of that path in many ways. He described the successive steps the seeker for truth has to go through. And he created the inner school of the Sufi Movement, the Sufi Order, to give personal guidance to sincere seekers. To initiates in this inner school he offered the possibility to develop the discipleship that has always been so important on the mystical path, and a range of spiritual practices that can help to open the heart and the inner senses but are also suitable for Westerners who remain active in worldly life.
For an essential aspect of Inayat Khan’s teaching was balance. He did not advocate withdrawing from the world in order to focus only on the inner life: on prayer, contemplation, and meditation. He shows us a human way, living in the world, meeting our obligations to our fellow human beings with sympathy and understanding – and at the same time learning to turn within and to come in touch with the peace and inspiration of the divine light. Then we discover the fullness of life. We can reach a balance between the inner life, where we open our hearts in surrender to the divine spirit, and the outer life, where we have to work actively to achieve our ideals and meet our obligations. Then our actions can be guided by the inspiration and wisdom we receive in our inner attunement, which will more and more shine through our outer work.
This mystical vision illuminates the whole of life: religion, philosophy, and psychology. The mystical path is also the essence of religion. For the purpose of the inner life – as Inayat Khan puts it – is to make God a reality. Not a theory, a dogma, or an abstraction, but the deepest experience we can have. This vision then leads to understanding the fundamental unity of all the great religions. For these religions have all been brought to humanity by successive messengers in different ages to awaken the feeling and realization of the divine. Inayat Khan shows that the God ideal is a great help for this, but that we have to realize that it can only be a help, a stepping-stone: that the divine Reality is beyond our limited intelligence and can only be experienced in the depths of our being, our soul, which itself is a spark of the divine light. Then we can see all religions as converging ways to the same goal. To express this idea, Inayat Khan created the Universal Worship, in which all religions are brought together in a ritual that shows how they are all kindled from the same divine light.
The philosophical aspect of the Sufi message is also important. The tremendous development of science and technology in the present time has made it difficult for many people to find their way to religion and to the inner life. For traditional religious dogmas and representations are at odds with modern scientific insight. But Inayat Khan’s mystical philosophy is completely in line with the deepening understanding of modern science.
The human way that the Sufi message shows means that through the experience and difficulties of the outer life we can make progress toward the inner goal. This is the psychological aspect of Inayat Kan’s teachings. Here he gives a remarkable insight into the workings of our mind. He shows the importance of the impressions which we receive constantly through the outer world, which will be registered in our memory and become living, influencing our feelings, thoughts, words, and actions. And he explains how we can learn to control our mind, allowing only the positive and desirable impressions to live and work within us. By controlling our mind we can then control our life. But as important as the impressions are in our life, they are still only reflections on the mirror of our soul, our inner consciousness. The soul itself remains always pure. Its nature is divine; and it is that divine nature that we have to discover in life.
In their moral aspect Inayay Khan’s teachings also describe a way of gradual progress, of evolution. He speaks about “moral culture” and “civilization of the heart.” We must learn to understand other people and their points of view, to develop consideration and sympathy for them. That widens our consciousness and helps to overcome the identification with our limited being, the great illusion which blocks our way to the knowledge of God.
The higher you rise, the deeper you must have gone first. There is no exception to this law.
Jung did not mean hell as a place of punishment. He meant it as the underworld of the psyche, everything rejected, buried, and denied. Every fear you have refused to name. Every wound you have covered instead of healing. Every part of yourself you decided was too ugly, too dangerous, or too shameful to claim as your own.
Most people try to grow upward while ignoring what lies beneath them. They chase enlightenment, success, or peace without ever descending into the parts of themselves they have spent a lifetime avoiding. And so they stay small, reaching toward the light with roots too shallow to hold real height.
The alchemists called this the nigredo, the blackening, the necessary descent into darkness before any true transformation can occur. You cannot skip this stage. You cannot bypass it with positivity or spiritual bypassing dressed as growth. The tree that reaches heaven does so precisely because its roots have gone where it is uncomfortable to look.
This is not a metaphor for the weak-hearted. It is a law of the psyche, as real as gravity. What you refuse to face controls you from below. What you finally face becomes the foundation that lets you rise.
The serpent wrapped around this tree is not the enemy of ascension. It is the guardian of it, the very thing that must be integrated, not defeated, before the branches can reach the sun.
Your shadow is not what is wrong with you. It is the root system waiting to hold your growth.
Although written in Christian language and style, A Course in Miracles clearly embodies the perennial wisdom found at the core of all the world’s great religions. Because of this universal nature, its significance and appeal transcend traditional boundaries and extend to all who seek answers to the deepest questions of human existence. Some Buddhists have said that the Course echos the words of the Buddha; yogis have remarked that it expresses the wisdom of Vedanta; and psychologists have found that it offers insights comparable to some of the best contemporary thinking about phenomena such as perception, belief, and identity.
The Course was written down by two psychologists, doctors Helen Schucman and William Thetford, who were both on the faculty of Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons. Beginning in 1965, Helen had a series of symbolic dreams and imagery experiences that culminated in hearing an inner Voice that began dictating the Course. She was both a psychologist and educator, conservative in theory and atheistic in belief, and was surprised and disconcerted by these events. Since she felt she was the scribe, not the author of this material, she therefore chose to remain anonymous. In her own words Helen said:
Three startling months preceeded the actual writing . . . . Although I had grown more accustomed to the unexpected by that time, I was still very surprised when I wrote, “This is A Course in Miracles . . .” That was my introduction to the Voice. It made no sound, but seemed to be giving me a kind of rapid, inner dictation which I took down in a short-hand notebook. The writing was never automatic. It could be interrupted at any time and later picked up again. It made me very uncomfortable, but it never seriously occurred to me to stop. It seemed to be a special assignment I had somehow, somewhere agreed to complete. It represented a truly collaborative venture between my friend [William Thetford] and myself, and much of its significance, I am sure, lies in that. . . . The whole process took about six years.
The Course was first published in 1976 and consists of three volumes. The first is a text that lays out the underlying thought system; the second a workbook with 365 lessons, one for each day of the year; and the third a teacher’s manual desighed to clarify terms and facilitate the teaching-learning process.
The language of the Course is traditional in its use of Christian terminology and masculine pronouns. Some non-Christians have therefore found that it can be more easily understood when terms such as “salvation” and “Son of God” are translated, for example, as “enlightenment” and “Child of God.” . . . The language of the Course is exceptionally poetic and contains a wealth of succinct, powerful, and moving aphorisms that readily stand by themselves as potent capsules of wisdom. [pp. 7-8]
A Cource in Miracles offers us a path of awakening. Like all such paths, the Course suggests that our usual perception, awareness, and sense of identity are clouded and distorted. It therefore offers us a means of correcting these distortions so that we may see ourselves and the world more clearly. This transformation of perception is what the Course means by a “miracle.” [p. 11]
The source of all our experience is the mind. The true nature of the mind, says the Course, is limitless transcendent awareness and creative power. However, our mistaken thoughts and beliefs, which direct the mind’s activiy, have distorted and constricted it. Consequently we must change our thoughts and beliefs in order to correct our perception and to restore the mind to its full potential. [p. 21]
The Course suggests that the world and time are creations of mind and part of our dreams and illusions. When we forget this we lose awareness of our true identity and see ourselves as limited to bodies in the temporal world. Yet we are free to seek beyong the world and time for the eternal and the changeless – already present, as the Course emphasixes, in this and every moment. [p. 37]
To relinquish identification with the ego and the body is to awaken to our true identity, says the Course. This true identity has remained as it always was – pure spirit – forever changeless, peaceful, and at one with God, awaiting only our recognition. [p. 51]
If we are to escape “the bondage of illusions” and recognize our true identity, we must overcome the obstacles that keep us from awakening. Anger and attack, defensiveness and guilt, fear and judgment are among these. The Course suggests that we create these obstacles out of false beliefs of unworthiness, inadequacy, and vulnerability. To relinquish them we must be willing to examine both obstacles and beliefs in the light of clear awareness, through which their illusory nature can be recognized. Only then can we experience the joy which is our natural condition. [p. 57]
Only when the mind is at peace can it be freed of illusions and opened to the liberating influence of love, joy, and the memory of God that lie deep within us. In this experience we regain our sanity, Self, and salvation. [p. 85]
The will is the most misunderstood faculty in the human being.
In popular thinking, willpower is the capacity to force yourself to do things you do not want to do. To override the body, suppress impulse, push through resistance. This conception of will is not wrong, it is simply shallow. It describes the ego’s crude approximation of something that, in its true form, operates entirely differently.
The esoteric traditions drew a sharp distinction between personal will and what Franz Hartmann, following the Rosicrucian and Theosophical lineage, called alignment with the universal will. The personal will, driven by desire, fear, ambition, the need to prove something, is powerful in the short term and self-defeating in the long. It fights against the current of existence. It exhausts itself in the effort of control. The Bhagavad Gita described this as action bound to ego and result, the kind that generates karma rather than liberation.
What Hartmann was pointing toward was something the Hermetic tradition called theurgy, the alignment of the individual will with the divine intelligence that underlies all form. The Great Architect is not a God to be appeased. It is the ordering principle of the cosmos itself, the logos, what the Stoics called the rational fire running through all things. To align with it is not submission. It is the recognition that the deepest current of your own nature and the current of the universe are not separate.
The alchemical process begins with the purification of the base material. In the work of the will, the base material is selfish desire, not desire itself, which is a form of life-force, but desire contracted around the small self. Calcination burns this away. What remains is will in its pure form: intentional, clear, undivided, moving without friction because it no longer moves against anything.
Jung described the individuation process as the ego learning to serve the Self rather than rule it. The will that has undergone this transformation does not push. It draws.
When many people think of “new age” they think of crystals and purple decals and ceremic angels in people’s windows and a kind of fuzzy thinking – which is abhorrent to a serious person. Fuzzy thinking is, after all, just one step above not thinking at all. But to take the ideas of serious transformational thinkers and philosophers and throw the “new age” label at them is also abhorrent. I feel that the term “new age” is used by bascically hostile media to diminish and marginalize a conversation that is very significant.
There is a fairly common misconception floating around that A Course in Miracles is “New Age.” I’ve encountered this misconception countless times over the years, and was recently reminded of this fallacy - which suggested to me that posting [the following] from a letter that Kenneth Wapnick wrote to the Library of Congress on the subject might be helpful.
Ken [who was a clinical psychologist and one of the foremost teachers of A Course in Miracles] maintained over the years of teaching the Course that it is not a New Age spirituality but rather has its intellectual roots in much earlier intellectual traditions, including the teachings of Plato, Neoplatonism, and the higher teachings of Gnosticism.
The following are excerpts from a letter Kenneth sent to the Library of Congress sometime in the 1990’s, requesting that they no longer classify the Course and Kenneth’s books under the category New Age. Kenneth’s efforts were successful.
Here are excerpts from Ken’s letter:
A Course in Miracles in many crucial ways is in sharp disagreement with New Age thinking, with many principles discussed in the book conflicting with many New Age principles. Five examples of this kind of conflict are as follows:
1) The theory of A Course in Miracles is based on a non-dualistic metaphysics; it teaches that the physical universe (including the body) was not created by God, and in fact, came about as an attack on God. No New Age system would support this; they all teach just the opposite.
2) A Course in Miracles does not support the thinking involved in “prosperity consciousness,” a prominent principle in New Age thought systems.
3) In almost all New Age systems there is an overriding emphasis on people’s positive experiences, with scant lip service paid to the overwhelming unconscious feelings of guilt shared by most people. A Course in Miracles teaches that there is only one problem in the world, and that is guilt. Therefore, it focuses primarily on our feelings of guilt, teaching us how to identify them and undo them.
4) Another theme common to many New Age systems is the belief that we are God. A Course in Miracles is emphatic in teaching that we are not God; it teaches that God is our Source – we have been created by Him.
5) On a more general level, A Course in Miracles is distinguished from New Age thought systems in that it draws upon traditional Freudian psychoanalytic principles (e.g., denial and projection), and, within philosophical and spiritual contexts, upon the Neoplatonic tradition and themes common to early Christianity and the Gnostic systems of the second and third centuries. My book, Love Does Not Condemn: The World, the Flesh, and the Devil According to Platonism, Christianity, Gnosticism, and A Course in Miracles, provides an in-depth exploration of these themes. Chapter 19 is especially helpful in understanding these conflicts.
Most people operate from one assumption: if you want something, go after it. Chase the opportunity. Pursue the outcome. Push harder when it does not arrive. And we live in a culture that has turned this relentless pursuit into a virtue.
But there is a different kind of intelligence. One that is older, quieter, and in the long run far more powerful.
The butterfly does not come to the person who chases it. The chasing itself is the problem. The frantic movement, the grasping energy, the desperation disguised as ambition creates exactly the conditions that drive away what you are trying to attract.
The garden is your inner life. Your character. Your craft. Your capacity for presence and depth. When you tend that with patience and care, without demanding an immediate return, something shifts. The right people find you. The right opportunities recognize you. Not because you forced it, but because you became someone worth coming to.
Tend the garden. Everything else follows.
As [we] embrace the Easter holidays, [let us] focus today on the sacred process encoded within the human journey, one that transcends religion and speaks directly to the architecture of the soul. The resurrection story of Jesus is not merely a historical or theological event: it is an archetypal map of transformation. It reveals the pathway through which the human being sheds the density of the lower nature and awakens its innate divinity.
Your lower nature is not “bad,” but it is limited. It is conditioned by fear, attachment, illusion, and the perceptual constraints imposed by the space-time matrix. These veils are powerful, designed to immerse consciousness fully into the human experience. Yet they also obscure your true essence: your eternal, multi-dimensional self.
The resurrection begins when the false self is allowed to die. This death is symbolic, yet deeply real. It is the surrender of identities, wounds, karmic imprints, and inherited belief systems that keep you bound to limitations. It is the willingness to release control and step beyond the known to embrace the unknown, even when the ego resists. In this surrender, something ancient within you begins to stir. Your true self has never been lost: only dormant.
It waits beneath layers of self-forgetfulness, beneath the noise of the conditioned mind. When the lower self dissolves, the soul rises. This is the resurrection: the re-emergence of your divine nature into conscious awareness. It is not granted from outside but activated from within. To embody Christ Consciousness is to live as this awakened self.
It is to perceive beyond separation, to act from unity, and to anchor higher intelligence into physical reality. In this state, you are no longer confined by the illusions of space-time, rather, you become a bridge between dimensions, a living expression of the Infinite Spirit beyond creation.
Mysticism is neither a faith nor a belief, nor is it a principle or a dogma. . . . [B]eing a mysic means having a certain temperament, a certain outlook on life. . . . No one can be a mystic and call himself a Christian mystic, a Jewish mystic, or a Muslim mystic. For what is mysticism? Mysticism is something that erases from one’s mind all idea of separateness, and if a person claims to be this mystic or that mystic they are not a mystic; they are playing with a name.
People think a mystic means a dreamer, an unpractical person who has no knowledge of worldly affairs. But such a mystic I would call half a mystic. A mystic in the full sense of the word must have balance; they must be as wise in worldly matters as in spiritual things. . . . It is not necessary to be unconscious of the world while being conscious of God. With our two eyes we see one vision; so we should see both God and the world as a clear vision at the same time. It is difficult, but not impossible.
Mysticism is an outlook on life. Things which seem real to an average person are unreal in the eyes of the mystic; and the things that seem unreal in the eyes of the average person are real in the eyes of the mystic.
. . . God is not abstract for the mystic; to the mystic God is a reality . . . the stepping-stone to self-realization. God is the gate, the door, the entrance to the heavens. God, for the mystic, is a key with which to open the secret of life, the abode from whence the mystic comes and to which they return and where they find their deepest and truest self to be at home.
