Marianne Williamson points out universal truths in A Course In Miracles - in this transcribed excerpt from her lecture, recorded live in Los Angeles earlier this year, called "Living in the Present Moment."
I’d like to begin tonight by reading to you from Lesson 70 in the workbook of A Course in Miracles and this lesson is, “My Salvation Comes from Me.” Now I know that most of you are well aware that A Course in Miracles is not a religion. There is no dogma and there is no doctrine. It is a psychological mind training that is based on universal spiritual themes.
It does speak about themes that are universal, but it speaks in places in very traditional Christian language.
Now as I was already mentioning tonight, I am not a Christian. And one of the things that I have found not being a Christian and reading A Course in Miracles is that there are words that do not trigger me the way they trigger some Christians because I didn’t have a background or a childhood where I am trying to detach from any doctrine, or dogma, or any experience that I was not particularly in love with. But it is my sense, having been doing the work that I do for as many years as I do it, and having come into contact with as many people as I have come into contact with, that there is a tendency among people that I have noticed, when it comes to some of these terms, to throw away the baby with the bath water. So what I think the Course of Miracles does is it brings these terms up for review. It brings these terms up in order for us to look at them in a light of a nonreligious, non-dogmatic, non-doctrinaire way of seeing. And so this tonight is certainly an example of the word salvation. We’ve all heard “Jesus saves” and “salvation”, etc. So understandably, somebody who is certainly not looking for an organized religious orientation, or even those who are but who for any particular reason want to stay away from words that remind them of Christian doctrine or dogma, sort of shy away from that word and don’t want to hear it. But in A Course of Miracles, we have a marvelous opportunity to look again at everything in life and to choose again. So I want to talk to you for a moment about what the meaning of the word salvation does when looked at from this nonreligious metaphysical perspective. There is a line in the Course that says that in the bible it says that Adam fell asleep, and nowhere does it say that he woke up. So the idea of the birth of human consciousness as we know it, which is called in metaphysics “Adam”, has been dominated for millions of years in time as we know it, as the Course of Miracles says, by a consciousness of fear. And it is so deep and it is so woven into the very nature of our sense of reality on this planet that of ourselves we cannot awaken from it. It’s everywhere. It’s every thought that anybody teaches us to think from the time that we are very young babies. We are taught the imagery of separation. We are taught the thoughts of attack and thoughts of defense, thoughts of separation. And so when someone says, “Just awaken from that dream,” it’s like, well, how do I just awaken from that dream?
Click Here to Listen to a Free Preview and to Purchase
Marianne Williamson Bio and Links
