AM asks: “Has anyone read the book, A Course in Love? It appears to be new age.”
AM is correct, but only partially. In addition to being a continuation of the “New Age” Bible known as A Course in Miracles (ACIM), the author of A Course of Love (ACOL) was also engaging in the occult art of channeling who she believed was Jesus when she wrote this book.
The author of ACOL is a woman named Mari Perron who describes herself as “a devout Catholic” living in St. Paul, Minnesota who became infatuated with ACIM in 1996 and claims to have read it seven times during the next two years.
For those who are unfamiliar with ACIM, it was a book containing alleged locutions from Jesus which were channeled through Helen Schucman, Ph.D., an Associate Professor of Medical Psychology at the College of Physicians and Surgeons at the Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center in New York City. Jesus supposedly dictated the book to her over the course of seven years and taught the world how to retrain their mind to get rid of the biblical understanding of right and wrong and create a new worldview in which there is no Satan, guilt, suffering, any need for Him as Redeemer. Hence, this book has come to be known as “the New Age Bible.”
Perron claims Jesus came to her in a dream in mid-1997 and told her, “You can no longer sell your mind for money. Your mind now belongs to God.” More than a year later, she began to hear a voice that she instantly recognized, not from the pages of the Bible, but from her many readings of ACIM. Jesus then proceeded to dictate three books to her over the course of the next three years. These books were supposedly meant to be a continuation of ACIM.
“Receiving Jesus and his guidance was easy,” Perron says in the Foreword of the book. “I loved the relationship and the process by which I wrote. The words arose from within, more or less as thoughts I didn’t think. This writing practice lasted three years. The work of it was effortless, uncomplicated, and awe-inspiring.”
The messages contain the usual New Age-inspired ideas, such as how this the age for sustaining Christ-Consciousness among more and more people.
“Christ-consciousness was represented not only by Jesus, but by his mother, Mary. Mary, like Jesus, realized full Christ-consciousness and full expression of Christ-consciousness in form. Each did so in individual ways, ways that revealed the choices available to those who would follow after them,” we read in one of the volumes of ACOL.
(Christ-consciousness has little or nothing to do with Christ, by the way. Although it has various meanings, the term generally describes the highest possible state of intellectual development and emotional maturity for which we must all strive in order to realize our true Self.)
Apparently, Perron learned the occult art of automatic writing in 1995 when she decided to try to communicate with her guardian angel. She wrote her angel a letter in which she asked, “Will you talk to me?”
“The answer came immediately, my fingers responding and typing the words almost before the thoughts had entered my mind. . . . I did not hear a voice distinct from my own. But I knew the words were not my own.”
The words said, “Smell the sweetness. You are sweet. Don’t try to force it, to will it, just let it come. It is there in the in-between, between thought and feeling. Breathe. Feel your heart.”
From that day forward, she began to receive messages from an angel which was going by the name of “Peace.”
I could go on and on, but you’ve probably heard enough to realize that this book is a poor choice of reading for any Christian. But it’s also very dangerous because, as was the case with Perron, we may also became accustomed to the sound of the false Christ (demon) who speaks in this book and thus be led down a dark and dangerous road of deception.
