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Like any good teacher, the Holy Spirit knows more than you do now, but He teaches only to make you equal with Him.
— A Course in Miracles T-6.V.1:1

Resign now as your own teacher....
—ACIM T-12.V.8:3

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At the age of 32, I ate a piece of banana cream pie that went really bad on me, resulting in a stomachache that would last for seven years. After the first four or five days — when it was clear that I could no longer pin the blame on the pie — I started a desperate search for other causes. These included intestinal parasites, stomach cancer, original sin, and whatever else crossed my feverish mind as I lay awake night after night, clutching my seizing abdomen.

After a couple months of visiting (and puzzling) conventional doctors, acupuncturists, and psychic healers, I luckily found a talented young MD who specialized in AIDS cases, which were then at epidemic levels. We had actually met before; a few years earlier when I was a weekly newspaper reporter, I’d covered his tax protest case against the IRS. (He lost, in case you’re wondering.) He happened to know about an immune dysfunction malady that was just coming to be known as Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS). When he gave me this brand-new diagnosis of an autoimmune failure, he succinctly summarized how it was different from the focus of his practice: “The good news is that you aren’t going to die. The bad news is that you’re probably going to wish you would.”

I’ve told this story elsewhere, so I’m going to focus here on the teaching aspects of CFS that would prove so profound. One of the first insights I gathered was truly (and gainfully) humiliating. After the first few fruitless weeks of hunting down a purely physiological cause for my immune collapse, I’d hesitantly begun to entertain the notion that my state of mind might have something to do with it. So I began sifting through my journals of the previous two years, searching for clues, and was chagrined to notice that I had developed a false and arrogant assurance about how sane, mature, and together I was.

In fact, I had pretty much concluded — by my early 30s, mind you — that I’d basically learned almost everything I needed to know about life. The only real objective left was to devise how I was going to successfully share my wealth of precocious wisdom, preferably in a series of best-selling novels that I didn’t quite know how to start. But once I did, and finished them, and became a famous author, the world was certainly going to be impressed.

The contrast between this anticipatory delusion and the total collapse of my real life could not have been more dramatic. It was, to borrow a term from the recovery tradition, my personal rock-bottom. There was an upside to this total defeat, however: the recognition that bottoming-out on my old self meant that I needed to start learning again. And there was an undeniable excitement in that realization, because I’d always reveled in being something of an autodidact in my youth, whenever schooling wasn’t getting in the way. Now, while I was getting an involuntary education in autoimmune challenges and general health management, I also decided it was time to start investigating my inner life.


The first step was to enter psychotherapy. I don’t remember how I found the therapist I engaged with, but he seemed like a nice, intelligent fellow, and a safe bet for exploring personal growth. He didn't have to prompt me, as it turned out that I was ready to start venting big-time about my troubled family-of-origin history. The therapist listened patiently to all my whining, blaming, and self-doubting week after week. He did have the classic, annoying therapist habit of responding to almost every sad story that I told with the inquiry, “And how do you feel about that?”

Yet that was actually useful because it made me aware that even while I was airing out all the disappointments, resentments, and sorrows of my rapidly crashing life, I didn’t really know how I felt about it all unless I was challenged to reflect. It was the first time I realized that complaining was a way to avoid facing any real feelings.

I wasn’t limiting my inward journey to ordinary therapy, however. I was also experimenting with dreamwork, shamanic journeying, Jungian depth psychology, and the transformational personality system known as the Enneagram. Those and other perspectives remain significant to me today. But far and away, the most profound and provocative pursuit that I discovered was a novel spiritual discipline — only about ten years old at the time — known as A Course in Miracles. It was also the most deeply disturbing psychological challenge I had ever encountered.

I’d come across a couple mentions of the Course in my freewheeling, no-holds-barred reading of the time. When I went to check it out in the esoteric bookstore across the street from my doctor’s office, I was immediately convinced it was a New Age rip-off. At the time it was available only in the original three-volume hardcover going for $39.95, if I remember correctly. I definitely remember feeling a strange sense of relief that it was out of my budget range; somehow I sensed a date with destiny that I was content to delay.

Two weeks later, after another medical appointment, I shuffled into the bookstore to find the owner stocking an entire shelf of the new, 3-in-1 paperback of the Course. I asked him if it was the same book as the hardcover, and he said, “Yes, just came in today. Only $19.95.”

And at that point I remember thinking, “Oh shit.” For reasons I didn’t understand, I felt like I’d just been offered a deal I couldn’t refuse — a deal for a psychic root canal, that is.

My misgivings were immediately confirmed when I started reading the Course that same night. The language was heavily religious (God, the Father, the Son, the Holy Spirit), setting off all my agnostic alarms from having grown up around bilious bible-belters. On top of that, the voluminous Text made no sense whatsoever, and the accompanying Workbook of 365 daily lessons started off with such welcoming affirmations as “Nothing I see means anything”;  “I do not understand anything I see”; “I am never upset for the reason I think”; and “My meaningless thoughts are showing me a meaningless world.”

Charming stuff, and not exactly the kind of spiritual perspective that one would expect to find alluring. Indeed, I initially found the Course to be dense, obnoxious, and personally insulting. In other words, I was hooked. As the first few days of study stretched into weeks of obsession, spending several hours daily in a simultaneous study of the Text and Workbook, I began to fear for my sanity. One of the signal aspects of CFS was called “brain fog” and I was definitely under that weather, regularly losing my wallet in plain sight, placing my keys in the refrigerator, and so on. I worried that my sudden absorption with the Course was yet another symptom of a failing mental faculty, and I told almost no one that I was involved with it.

Yet it's worth noting that despite my conscious resistance to the teaching and the fear it engendered, I also felt a haunting, subterranean sensation of healing — as if something deep and long disordered in myself was silently coming into a mystical alignment. That feeling was what kept me unconsciously engaged, despite the conscious impulses to hurl the blue book against the wall (and I indulged those impulses more than once).

After six weeks or so my schizoid experience with the Course was getting the better of me, and I felt an almost desperate need to have my mind set straight about it. The mass delusions of Jonestown and Rajneeshpuram were still fresh in cultural memory, and while I didn’t think I could be brainwashed, I couldn’t be sure in my current state. No one I knew seemed to know anything about it, and at the time there wasn’t much available in the press or in books.

This disturbance happened to coincide with a restlessness about the course of my therapy. I was getting tired of hearing myself complain, and my therapist hadn’t made any suggestions about new avenues of personal growth to explore. So in our next encounter, I complained that I was dissatisfied with the progress of our therapeutic relationship, given its weekly expense and the persistence of my emotionally mired condition. I inquired, very tentatively, if he might have any ideas for a new direction.

Quite annoyingly he responded, “So what do you think might be a good new direction?”

Without any idea of whether my therapist would know what I was talking about, I volunteered that I had undertaken a secret study of something called A Course in Miracles. I allowed that it was very difficult to describe and so I wouldn’t even try, but I was a little worried about how it seemed to be sucking me in, and no one I knew was doing it, and just in case he had ever heard of it, I wondered if it was a good thing or a bad thing, or….

My rushed, nervous confession was interrupted by the squeak of my therapist’s chair as he learned back in his chair and clasped his hands behind his head. “If you can handle the Course,” he said with a knowing smile, “you don’t need me.”

And that was the end of our therapeutic engagement. I think we were both relieved.


This year, 2025, marks my fortieth anniversary as a student of a teaching that’s only fifty years old itself. So I’ve been around for most of the history of A Course in Miracles, and it has played a central role in the direction of my life since I discovered it. After writing a handful of books and too many essays inspired by ACIM — and being instrumental in the publishing careers of other writers inspired by it — I can definitely say this much: the jury is still out on the question of whether I can handle the Course.

One thing is for sure: it was touch-and-go there for a while... like the first 20 years. In contrast to the know-it-all attitude I’d held just before I became ill, soon after starting my ACIM study I entered a prolonged state of I-don’t-know-anything, inspired by such heartening provocations as this:

"Where concepts of the self have been laid by is truth revealed exactly as it is. When every concept has been raised to doubt and question, and been recognized as made on no assumptions that would stand the light, then is the truth left free to enter in its sanctuary, clean and free of guilt. There is no statement that the world is more afraid to hear than this: I do not know the thing I am, and therefore do not know what I am doing, where I am, or how to look upon the world or on myself." (ACIM, T-31.V.17:4-7)

It's an irony of the human condition that most folks spend most of their lives building and reinforcing their "concepts of the self" — the ego and all its defensive quirks, that is — only to realize late in life that one's ego-self has mostly stood in the way of experiencing the deepest truth of their own minds. If we are peculiarly lucky, as I was, the ego may crash relatively early in our lifespan, opening us up to a spiritual path of seeking that truth over more ego-reinforcement. As luck would have it, that does not exactly place us on Easy Street. But at least it makes us aware that there is another voice besides the ego's to attend to in daily life, and in our most significant decisions.

A Course in Miracles identifies that voice as the Holy Spirit, which is not an ethereal ghost hovering round our shoulders, but simply another part of the mind than what we're accustomed to hearing. It's a quiet but profound voice that reminds us to choose love over fear, and that consistently teaches forgiveness over judgment. It takes both discipline and discretion to stay attuned, but the Course reminds us that "The still, small Voice for God is not drowned out by all the ego’s raucous screams and senseless ravings to those who want to hear It." (ACIM, T-21.V.1:6)

Of course, one doesn't have to look far into the world to see how often the ego's screams and ravings trump much quieter voices for truth. But the abundance of foolish teachers out there doesn't mean we have to listen to them, or accept their fearful views of reality. The Course is just one tool among many for accessing our own inner voice of wisdom, although it's an uncommonly powerful one. As such, I don't know that it can ever be mastered or even "handled." It's meant to introduce us to a transcendent way of seeing that may always be experienced as somewhat shocking, as long as we're holding onto any favorite delusions. Hence, if studying A Course in Miracles ever starts to feel consistently comfortable, I'll suspect that I'm losing the way.

Still, wisdom isn't everything. Even though I find myself at an age where it seems wise to avoid sweet indulgences, I think that a fortieth anniversary really demands a special treat. You know what I'm talkin' about. I mean, it's been years...

 

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D. PATRICK MILLER is the author of a dozen books, published by Hay House, Penguin Random House, Hampton Roads Publishing, and his own imprint of Fearless Books. First trained as an investigative journalist, he began writing about spirituality, human potential, and creativity after a seven-year illness initiated his spiritual path. Since that time he has intensively studied A Course in Miracles, the Enneagram system of personality, Jungian depth psychology, shamanism, and other realms of contemporary spirituality. He has also applied spiritual principles and disciplines intensively in his own life, and written about the results. As a magazine and online journalist, Patrick has written over 100 articles for Yoga Journal, THE SUN, Elephant Journal online, and many other media including this website. He is also the founder of Fearless Books and Literary Services, a business which has facilitated the work of many other spiritual writers for two decades.

 

 

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