Kenneth has identified a number of key themes that are central to understanding A Course in Miracles. They go to the heart of the Course's metaphysical teachings on the nature of the world and our identity, with powerful implications for the Course's practice of forgiveness. The nature of and relationship between cause and effect is one of them. The foundational principle ideas leave not their source is another. Although Kenneth has addressed these themes repeatedly in his teaching over the years, we are featuring specific programs this month where Kenneth has focused on them, examining them in depth.

Kenneth has combined two related programs in this set aimed at helping us appreciate the essence of this underlying principle in the Course 's theory and application. To begin to recognize its significance, we must be at least willing to consider shifting our identification from the body to the mind. The fact that we believe we are bodies living in the world demonstrates that we have chosen to believe that ideas can leave their source, for the truth is, within the split mind that we all share, we remain ideas in a mind, dreaming of a world outside ourselves, and we have not left our source in the split mind. The miracle fosters this growing realization, as we begin to understand that the only ego purpose for bodies and the world is to attempt to get rid of the imagined guilt in the split mind that we believe condemns us for thinking we could ever leave our Source in Heaven. It is this recognition that leads us towards a growing realization that we remain as God created us, a Thought or Idea in His Mind, and we have never left our Source. The increasing shift towards abstraction involved in this healing process is fearful while we still want to believe we are specific individual bodily selves, and so the process for most of us must be a slow, gentle one, fostered by the practice of forgiveness for ourselves and others we still perceive as separate from us.