The Voice for God

Breath, Word, Thought, Sound:

If you do the lessons of A Course in Miracles with “effort and great willingness” to see an alternative to your present condition, you will experience an alternative. This is a miraculous undertaking with miraculous results. What other text can make such a claim? The question arises, how can such an illumination occur? How can the language, how can the words on a page, effect an illumination of my mind?

Content and Structure

There are three ways of looking at this question. The first two have to do with the content and structure of a line, and how they are seamlessly blended. For example, read aloud the title of Lesson 132:

I loose the world from all I thought it was.

First the content. I “loose” means to break up, let go. To “loosen” is the root meaning of dissolve, resolve, solve. I loosen my hold on seeing the world as I habitually “thought” it. “Thought” takes on the meaning of “I thought it was this way or that way,” and simultaneously it means I thought the world into existence. It “all” begins with a thought in my mind.

Read the sentence aloud again. You probably postured your voice like this, stressing the syllables in caps:

i LOOSE the WORLD from ALL i THOUGHT it WAS.

This is the rhythm of iambic pentameter, the perfect blend of sound and sense, the structure of the language. This blend might be taken for granted, unless you realize that you can also have one or the other, for example:

You GET the re SULTS of your THINK ing.

This statement is absolutely true, yet it is prose not poetry, having no regular pattern to the slacks and stresses.

Or you can have a regular pattern of sound without True sense:

Be STILL my BEAT ing HEART.

That there is a heart that beats is a thought that can be loosed.

We looked at only one line from A Course in Miracles:

I loose the world from all I thought it was.

There is no question that the entire Course is written with the perfect blend of content and structure.

Riding on the breath

After dealing with the illuminative effect of content and structure, we look at the third element, the medium of the Course. The medium is not the text, not the pages. The medium is something we experience moment-to-moment while reading the words on the page. The medium is ever-present. The medium carries the message. The message is conveyed by the medium. The medium is breath.

Words are carried on the breath. Words contain thoughts. The breath and words and thoughts ride on the sound of the voice. The voice is where the illumination occurs. We listen to the Voice for God that replaces our habitual voice. It is an action of the mind. It occurs in the mind.

Those last sentences rode on a gush of passion, but let’s be very exacting when we say that words ride on the breath. Otherwise, it stays just a lovely metaphor.

Read this sentence aloud:

Let me learn to give the past away, realizing that in so doing I am giving up nothing.

Read it aloud again, yet this time place your hand on your chest and begin. What you may discover is that just before reading it, you took a breath, and your chest swelled as you took it in. You may have paused at the first comma, took another breath just before saying “realizing,” and then either completed the sentence or perhaps stopped between “doing” and “I,” a possible caesura, or break in the line. This demonstrates that words are carried on the breath, and it is not just a figure of speech.

Let’s break it down some more. Say the first word of the sentence, “Let.”

Observe exactly what happens in your vocal apparatus as you utter the word.

Your breath vibrates through your vocal cords. The tip of your tongue closes against your upper palate, just behind your teeth. The sound slides around both sides of your tongue, passing the inside of your cheeks, that slightly squeeze in. That is just for the “L” sound. Your tongue releases, the breath flows over the tongue, making the “eh” sound. Your tongue snaps shut just behind your teeth, slightly forward from when it rested before, and forcefully snaps open, forming the “t” sound.

Never again will the word riding on a breath be simply a metaphor.