Path of Light: Stepping into Peace with "A Course in Miracles"

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Summary: Path of Light Review
Review: Robert Perry has a way of making the complex clear with sequential reasoning and sound logic. His book, The Path of Light, does just that by displaying the principles, background and study of A Course in Miracles (ACIM) in language that is easy to understand and read. The viewpoint is pure ACIM standing on its own with no personal prejudices getting in the way. The amazing thing is that it does all of this without sounding like a textbook. It has a page turning quality more like a novel. This is really an enjoyable book to read for either long-term ACIM students or those just beginning. I highly recommend it.

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Summary: A Gift for Every Season
Review: Robert Perry's Path of Light would make an excellent gift for anyone who is, or might be, interested in spirituality. It is a "must read" for anyone who would like to understand more clearly the message of A Course in Miracles (ACIM). His writings set the Gold Standard for interpreting ACIM. He promises "careful scholarship" in the Introduction (p. xxxi), and delivers just that.

He begins by asking "What is A Course in Miracles?" (Intro. p. xxvii.) Along the way he tells of how the Course was "scribed" in the 1960's by an eccentric, perhaps "bi-polar" genius, Dr. Helen Schucman. She was, at the time, professor of medical psychology at Columbia University's School of Medicine, in New York. She has since passed on. (Perry says that you don't have to believe that Jesus wrote the Course to fully benefit from reading it.) He also discusses the problems people have had trying to categorize the Course. Mostly, they are trying to use familiar conceptions from the past, which don't fit the Course at all. One mischaracterization is that the Course is a kind of "Christianized ... Vedanta," (p. 28).

I, with Perry, have learned from reading the Course that the past is a trap for understanding. Whether one is seeking to understand a great book, like the Course, or oneself, the past is a dead weight that obscures more than it clarifies. In my view, ACIM, if it is to be understood, must be seen as pregnant with the future.

I read the Course as a treatise on scientific social psychology, but written in pre-scientific language. In the same spirit that moves science, the Course seeks to describe and explain its take on reality. But the language given in the social sciences of the 1960's was incapable of conveying the realities and dynamics captured in its author's vision. The Course goes way beyond Christianity, Vedanta, Buddhism, and the other religions of the past, because it presents a unified intellectual system that can be tested in practice here and now. That makes the Course a science, albeit one in need of a new scientific language. In other words, the insights and understandings of the Course are so far ahead of the drab, inhuman, mechanistic and objectivistic language of its time, that it had to be written in a default language; namely, Christianity.

Robert Perry's writings go a long way towards trimming away some of the excess religious rhetoric in the Course, and presenting the science embedded in it. His aim is to clarify "the actual realities of which the Course speaks" (p.15). ACIM deals comprehensively with inward realities that can't even be mentioned in the constraining language of contemporary social science. Perry's Path of Light is an introduction to the Course's social psychology. He lucidly summarizes the elements and dynamics of mind that all humans share, but of which most are unaware. This includes the façade that most people present to others, the rage underneath it, and the potential for love buried under the human anger (although I wonder if the term "themes" might do better than "levels").

As I read it, the Course rests upon the implied axiom that all people need completion. Of course, most people are not aware of this need. That is why they spend their lives pursuing illusions. (A point which Perry didn't emphasize enough.) This is why, as Perry points out, the Course is largely an educational program. One lesson to be learned is what one needs. A person who has learned to recognize the need for completion in himself or herself is then in a position to realign his or her wants in accord with this universal human need.

As Perry notes, completion consists in "experiencing oneness with God" (p. 14). This experience entails a joyous feeling of being one within, with others, and with nature. Everyone has the potential for this experience and understanding, and after one has attained these, one will feel complete. Prior to that, each person lives in the false feeling of "separation." This is a false feeling because in reality we are already one, but most of us are simply not aware of it. Of course, science has always aimed at undoing humanity's ignorance about reality.

Perry astutely underscores that the Course's focus is on meaning. The Course presents "a system in which meaning occupies a central place" (p. 152). Thus, people live in the feeling of separation because they define themselves as living in separation. The variance between the reality of our oneness, and our definition of ourselves as separate is the cause of our frustration, anger, emptiness, loneliness, and other ill feelings. Conversely, a change of meanings, based on our recognition of our realities, can generate the healthy feelings of unconditional altruism and happiness.

The Course offers a text, a workbook, and a guide for teachers in a one-volume book. These, as Perry explains, are aimed at educating its readers as to how to reconfigure their personal meanings so as to fill their lives with joy, inner peace, and love. Our self-defeating, self-made meanings produce a frustrated and resentful ego that finds its greatest pleasure in life to be attacking others. This may result in violence, as in wars, but mostly it is done by casting "killer judgments" at others in the safety of one's imagination. An ego thus inflicted with self-caused pain sees the world darkly, and fails to find true joy in living. Perry makes it clear that in the Course's social psychology, fear prevails where there could be love.

Three minor quibbles: First, the Course's ego is not Freudian. The Course focuses on spiritual, one could say "existential," motivation, not sexual or reproductive. Also, the Course follows a strict theory of responsibility that denies us all the excuse that "my unconscious made me do it." In Lesson 136 the Course says that all decisions are conscious, but are often made quickly and then covered over with a false face of innocence, or "quickly forgotten." (Cf. Thomas Szaz.)

Secondly, Perry zips past the Course's conception of "the last step," with only two sentences (p. 92). Yet, this is the vital transition point from separation to completion. How does this work? More importantly, why doesn't it work more easily, and for more people?

Finally, Perry nods to the extent that he characterizes the Course as proscribing a life of Christian ethics. ACIM is concerned with cause and effect, and is not a pious guide to living the life of a "good Pilgrim." Perry's last two chapters are especially tainted with the fallacious suggestion that we must force ourselves to engage in "gentle" and "generous" behavior, if we are to achieve our full spiritual potential. This notion entails several problems. One is that the Course is not about behavior, it is about changing meanings so as to experience a better quality of life. Also, slipping ethics into a reading of the Course invites the very dogmatism and judgementalism that the Course virtually curses.

The cause and effect principle that the Course teaches ultimately rests upon a certain kind of "willingness." That is this: if you have the willingness to be as one, and to see yourself and others with compassion, and to fully disengage from thinking that you know what is right and wrong, or good and evil, and to desist from judging yourself and others by those arrogant thoughts, then completion will come to you. Perry's insertion of ethics into the Course obscures the point that most needs clarification and emphasis.

In the same vein, Perry sets up a moral model, or what I call a "spiritual hero," which is quit contrary to the Course. Boosting a saintly model of behavior that no mere mortal can live up to risks encouraging the very "profound self-loathing" (p. 115) that Perry correctly says the Course wants to replace with a compassionate self-understanding.

Nevertheless, I have no problem forgiving Perry's tiny misstatements given the gratitude I feel for the sterling scholarship and easy read he has given us. Although the Barbarians have been disarmed, the Course community must still beware of false gurus (as Perry wisely says, p. 197). Path of Light is a well-written and reliable reference point by which to check the teachings about ACIM by would-be gurus. This is why Perry's book is a fine gift for every season.
William J. Kelleher, Ph.D. is the author of Marxist Spirituality: Why Widespread Spiritual Enlightenment Cannot be Achieved in the Capitalist System, and What To Do About It (forthcoming).