Blog • School for A Course In Miracles

The School for A Course in Miracles (SFACIM) and Kenneth Wapnick

November 4, 2014

The Denver based School for A Course in Miracles (formerly School of Reason) was founded in 2007 by three long-time A Course in Miracles students in response to a perceived need for Course classes that present a unified, accurate and consistent understanding of the Course’s rather complex thought systems. We, ourselves, had found this consistency in the study materials generated by eminent Course scholar, Kenneth Wapnick, Ph.D.

Even after 20 or 30 years of independent study of the Course, the benefits in working with Dr. Wapnick’s material was so profound for us that we wanted all students to experience the accelerated learning that takes place when using his insightful and illuminating material. Through the use of his books, CD’s and DVD’s his influence is found in all the offerings of School for A Course in Miracles (SFACIM). Be sure to check out some of Ken’s brief 10 minute youtube video presentations on different Course topics, and visit his Foundation’s website @ facim.org. Ken made his transition in Dec. 2013.

For the serious student the Course presents a lifetime practice of healing and forgiveness. School for A Course in Miracles offers classes and study groups for every stage of the journey. A student can see a path of Course education before him and be assured of consistency in the message and high quality of teaching and mentoring.

**All of our SFACIM classes, unless otherwise noted, are currently online.** For up to date SFACIM class info, click here.

Please note: Ken Wapnick’s The Foundation for A Course in Miracles (facim.org) and Our School for ACIM (sfacim.org) are separate entities, each with their own ACIM classes and their own websites. **Both however are based on the profound and insightful teachings on A Course in Miracles by Dr. Kenneth Wapnick.**

More on Ken and his Foundation:

Kenneth Wapnick taught and wrote about A Course in Miracles for more than 35 years, publishing more than 30 books and over 200 audio and video recordings of his classes and lectures, some works authored with his wife, Gloria. He is widely regarded as the world’s foremost teacher of the Course, which he has said is the most important spiritual document for our age. Kenneth, with a Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology, was an associate of Dr. Helen Schucman, scribe of the Course, and Dr. William Thetford, Helen’s close friend, colleague, and collaborator in the scribing. Kenneth worked with Helen for over a year preparing the Course for publication.

In 1983, Kenneth and Gloria began the Foundation for A Course in Miracles in Ardsley NY, which moved to Crompond NY, then Roscoe NY, Temecula (Ca.) and is now located in Henderson, Nevada. The Foundation’s principal purpose over the years has been to assist students in understanding the Course through classes, discussion groups, and written, audio, video, and digital publications. The depth of Ken’s understanding of the Course’s thought system, his clarity and humor, and his constant demonstration of the Course’s gentle message of peace thru forgiveness continue to attract large numbers of people to his writings and recordings. It is the Foundation’s mission since Ken’s passing in December of 2013 to assure that his truly remarkable legacy of teachings continues to be available, now and for future generations. His website: www.facim.org

For a list of hundreds of Course topics talked about by Ken Wapnick in a question and answer format:

click here

Other Online Groups/ Facilitaors

**that also present A Course in Miracles based on Ken Wapnick’s teachings on ACIM:**

Mondays & Thursday Evenings @ 6:30pm Mt. : Barnes Knowles barnesknowles@onmail.com ‭(720) 434-0982‬

Fridays (1st & 3rd 0f each month) @ 10 am Mt. : David Delaplane dadelaplane01@gmail.com ‭(303) 915-1754

Sat. mornings @ 10am Mt. : Lori P. 720-981-7318 or at EMailLoril@gmail.com

Tuesdays @ 7pm Mt. : Susan Dugan click here

Tues. (12:30pm Mt) & Wed. (7pm Mt) Maria Young click here

Wednesdays @ 11am Mt. : facim.org click here

Musings: Is It Healing or Fixing?

October 15, 2014

“You can’t fix what isn’t real. What’s real doesn’t need fixing.”

When you see a problem in someone else—sickness, mood, disposition—it is your mind that is in need of healing, not the one in whom the problem appears to reside.

There is only one problem…..ever. It is the idea of separation in the mind. If the indivisibility of a single whole mind is to be recognized, healing of the mind must occur.

A Course in Miracles is maddeningly relentless and impeccable in its teaching of non-duality. It leaves no un-swept corners in the mind where the ego’s belief in separation can remain hidden. One of those corners is our own good intentions to help others with their problems without first healing ourselves.

When we attempt to fix problems in someone else we are missing the point. It is an opportunity for our own healing, not someone else’s. Only a healed healer can heal. He heals by knowing we are all already healed. The certainty in his mind extends through his mind to other minds without him doing anything for which he could take either credit or blame.

This is not to say that one could not also do something in whatever form might be most helpful. However his certainty is that regardless of what he does in form, healing is already accomplished.

How different this is from fixing which can only occur where there is an idea of inequality and of “other”.

Yesterday someone tried to fix a problem that I thought I had. He first had to make the problem real by agreeing with it. He then took out his tools that he had learned in a training and began to try to fix my problem. The feeling that arose within me as this was going on was one of inequality. He, with his solution, was superior to me with my problem. Now we both had the same sickness, separation. There was no way out.

When we try to heal at the level of form we are attempting to keep the real problem which is in the mind. That way the ego, our false sense of self, is preserved.

This whole situation illustrated the important distinction between healing and fixing. If there is anything but perfect equality in any relationship the idea of competition has entered the mind. How can there be healing where there is one who is superior? Separation is reinforced rather than healed.

Unhealed healers believe the problem is where it is not, in the body and not the mind. The fact is that we are all already healed…..no exception. Minds are already joined and there is only one.

Nothing that is real that could possibly need fixing. Nothing unreal exists. We do not believe that however, or we wouldn’t be seeing the world of suffering that we see. It is the seer that needs to change the way in which he sees. He needs to learn to see with different eyes and hear with different ears. For that shift he needs a Teacher from beyond the world of form, one that doesn’t believe in differences of any kind.

A Course in Miracles teaches us how to make ourselves accessible to a Teacher who can show us how to look with a single eye from beyond the body and see a different world. This translocation of self from identification with the body to a singular consciousness is the awakened state we all pretend to seek and at the same time fear. It is the shift from the personal and the private, to the oneness of heaven and non-specificity. This is the land of “no-thing” and it is this that you and I fear. That’s what God is. And that’s what Love is. And thats what the Peace of God is. And that’s Heaven. And that’s what you are afraid of.

Would you like to live without fear? Would you like to experience Love? Would you like to be free of torment?

Musings: “Where are dreams but in a mind asleep?”

September 7, 2014

A course to end all dreaming- that’s what A Course in Miracles is. All ego dreams, sleeping or waking, are based in fear. Whether the plot be pleasurable or painful, triumphant or ends in loss, ego dreams are spawned in mind asleep and dreaming of separation. In those dreams we are separated from God and our brothers, and feel split within our own mind. What good can possibly come from dreams that seek to prove that separation is reality?

A world in which we are born into a body that lives a little while and then grows old and dies is the dream that Jesus, teacher of resurrection, will awaken us from if only we will listen to him and do as he says. Resistance is strong because we believe our little lives, pitiful as they may be, are what we are. It is a mistake to be corrected, not a sin to be punished.

Jesus makes a distinction in his course that is still unknown to most of the world. The distinction is fundamental to learning and applying the Course’s lessons so that they change the way we see the world. To the individual it is a prison or a playground, determined by whether our specialness gets what it wants or not. When we get our way it is a playground. When we don’t, it is a prison. Our response when we don’t like the way things go is to change behavior or circumstances. To Jesus the world is a classroom for changing our minds. The problem is we don’t know we have a mind.

In the Course Jesus teaches us that the brain is not the mind. It is part of the body, the manifestation of the thought of separation. Its function is given it by the ego that treasures specialness and individuality and seeks only to prove our personhood is true. The effect is to keep us mindless and asleep. Unaware that we have a mind we can never change it. This is significant because it is the mind not the body that awakens or resurrects. Resurrection is the lesson Jesus learned that “most of all he would have us learn.” C5. 6:8 How can we learn it if we choose to remain asleep and dreaming, believing what our brains and bodies tell us? This is the ego’s fool proof defense of its false identity. But it is not “God proof”.

The world misunderstood Jesus’ earlier teaching of the resurrection over 2000 years ago because it did not have the education that Jesus is now giving us in A Course in Miracles. It could only assume that the body resurrected because it did not know about a mind, let alone how to change it. In learning that our home is in the mind and that minds are joined we can become happy learners of another way that ends dreaming through the gentle path of forgiveness. Forgiveness is something anyone can do simply because it requires nothing of us but a little willingness to learn from a teacher other than our ego. It is a level playing field on which everyone is equally qualified to join Jesus in what he calls “a game that happy children play.” W-p1.153.12:1

Forgiveness, the miracle, the holy instant, and the holy relationship are all terms used in the Course for the return to the mind. They signify stepping above the world’s battleground and joining Jesus in true humility and willingness to be taught. We cannot teach ourselves because we are the problem– the dreamer of fearful dreams in which everything dies. Who would doubt Jesus advice: “Resign now as your own teacher, for you have been badly taught.” T-12…V.8:3

If we knew for certain that the world is a dream we would not hesitate to leave it. It is forgiveness that shows us its unreality. Jesus overcame the world by not believing in it and we must do the same. It is not by struggling against it, but through the process of forgiveness that we learn the world cannot affect us, and ultimately that it does not exist at all. “There is no world! This is the central thought the course attempts to teach.” W-p1…132.6:2,3

Jesus is waiting for our resignation as our own teacher to give him the chance to show us that we can never be harmed, or hurt, or suffer, or die. Pain of any kind is a dream of punishment for a crime that never happened in the Mind of God where we reside. God does not sleep, nor dream, and we are like Him and not as we have made ourselves. Nor can we leave His Mind except in sleep.

“From the heart, may it go to the heart.”

Musings: Invitation to Love’s Presence

June 24, 2014

“Undoing the blocks to the awareness of love’s presence” is the curriculum of A Course in Miracles. It is a required course….undoing the blocks, that is. Only the time we take it is voluntary.

Everyone, without exception, wants to feel love’s presence informing their thoughts and actions while moving through this world of time and space. As our natural inheritance, it goes with us wherever we go.

Love is singular so there are no separate wills. The One Will for us is perfect happiness. It’s our will as well. Why should we choose to go against That Will? That’s a good question.

Perhaps we think we have a private will and would like The One Will to deliver on our terms. Bob Dylan once sang in the song, When Ya Gonna Wake Up, “Do you think that God is just an errand boy to satisfy your wandering desires?”

God gives us more than we know how to desire.

Those things we think we want are childish and self-centered. They are part of dreaming but they will not give us what we really want. God’s Will is beyond anything we can imagine.

When we begin the journey home we don’t believe that there is something more fulfilling than having our personal needs and wants met. We are familiar with the dreams and even though their pleasure is fleeting we prefer them to an unknown surprise that might awaken us from dreaming entirely.

Sharing the journey with others encourages us to give up the belief in sacrifice. Love does not demand sacrifice of any kind. Our own plans for happiness fade as we begin to feel love’s presence. I hope we can learn this together.

Musings: Save Yourself, Bless the World

May 30, 2014

“Let Him teach you what you need to learn to lay all fear aside, and know your Self as love, which has no opposite in you.”

Please consider this today. There is a Presence that surrounds you, which is your Self. It is constantly informing you of your True Nature which is love without opposite. The environment in which it resides is a state of grace.

When you are absorbed in your body self, consumed with fear, conflict and self interest you cut off the possibility of harmonizing with this Loving Presence which would make your day purposeful and effortless.

Private (what about me?) thoughts of worry, anxiety, lack, inadequacy, and so on, must be brought to the light of this Presence so they can be shined away and you can return to alignment with the Self that you are. This is your responsibility now. This is your salvation and the salvation of the world.

Forgive your personal insanity and the insanity of the world so that this Presence can transform your thoughts and actions in this moment bringing peace to you and to the tired and aching world. This is your part in The Great Awakening that is occurring in all humanity now.

This strength is yours to feel and to give. It is your joy. Your part is essential now.

All of our SFACIM classes, unless otherwise noted, are currently online. For up to date SFACIM class info, click here.