Contemplative Comparison: ACIM Reviews & Advaita Vedanta's Path to Realization

Contemplative Comparison: ACIM Reviews & Advaita Vedanta's Path to Realization

For students of A Course in Miracles, the Review sections are vital. They're not just about rote memorisation; they're an invitation to deepen our understanding and experience. This process bears a striking resemblance to the ancient Advaita Vedanta tradition's three-fold path to self-realization: Sravana, Manana, and Nididhyasana (commonly used in Shankara-based traditions).

Sravana (Listening/Hearing): In Advaita, this is the initial exposure to the sacred texts and teachings from a qualified teacher. In ACIM's Review Section 1, we are asked to review the previously learned ideas, often doing so slowly and thoughtfully. This is our "hearing" of the truth, often for the first time in a way that truly resonates.

Manana (Reflection/Contemplation): After hearing, Advaita emphasizes deep reflection and intellectual assimilation to remove doubts. Similarly, ACIM's Review encourages us to "think about" each idea, allowing it to "sink in" and challenging any resistance or confusion that may arise. It's about letting the mind wrestle with the concept until clarity emerges and intellectual conviction takes root.

Nididhyasana (Meditation/Abiding): This is the experiential phase in Advaita, where one meditates deeply on the truths, transcending intellectual understanding to direct realization. ACIM mirrors this perfectly by instructing us to "close your eyes and practice" the ideas, allowing them to settle into our experience. It's not enough to simply understand; we are invited to be with the truth, to abide in it, allowing it to transform our perception and ultimately, our reality.

Both traditions, though culturally distinct, point to the same fundamental process: a systematic journey from initial exposure to profound, liberating realization. The ACIM Review, like Sravana, Manana, and Nididhyasana, is designed to move us beyond mere intellectual assent to an experience of the truth, guiding us home to the peace that is our natural inheritance.

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The ego has no being. (ACIM)

I had been listening to and reading A Course in Miracles (Text), when I came across this quote:


"The ego is incapable of knowing how you feel. When I said that the ego does not know anything, I said the one thing about the ego that is wholly true. But there is a corollary; if only knowledge has being and the ego has no knowledge, then the ego as no being." (Text 8-VIII.7)


This reminded me of the use (in some circles) whereby the word 'knowledge' is interpreted as 'knowing' or the act of knowing (i.e. being aware) only, rather than in the usual sense of amassing intellectual data/facts/thoughts etc.


In this sense, 'knowledge' or 'knowing only' equates exactly with being, since both as also synonyms for just awareness or consciousness.


Hence, a thought construct, including the primal thought-construct-tendency which is the 'ego' ('I-thought'), cannot actually know anything, in the sense that it is not self-aware or endowed with any form of awareness itself-- but rather lives only as a construct existing in our awareness. The ego doesn't assert itself in deep sleep (or death) for instance, and at times when our waking consciousness seems to be in abeyance.


Being without awareness (knowledge) and being just a thought-construct, the ego thus has no being itself, and is rather just like a computer program- playing out its programming as it was created to do, relying on power beyond itself, and mostly for the sake of the body and its own survival.


This leads to the inquiry of what one really is, if the ego ("I-construct) and the body have no inherent being in themselves.. and taking into account that we normally regard ourselves as a body-mind entity.


Without jumping into further concepts, such as 'we are soul, spirit, Otherness' etc.. it is possible to stop and enquire directly into the nature of what we are in this moment, with the understanding that we are prior to the awareness of ourselves as a body, and prior to the awareness of ourselves as an ego. One means for doing this is via the practiced habit of self-attentiveness and patient observation directed squarely at one's "self" (or the feeling of one's "self").