Helen Schucman

Helen Schucman, Ph.D. (14 July 1909 – 9 February 1981) was a research psychologist from New York City, most famous for her work in producing A Course in Miracles. From 1958 through 1976 she was a professor of medical psychology at Columbia University in New York.

Portrait of Helen Schucman

See also A Course in Miracles

Quotes

• There’s nothing that I would call ordinary audition about this at all. It doesn’t really.. It’s a curious thing that will be very difficult to explain. Somebody asked me, “Was it as though your hand was moving?” No. I wrote perfectly voluntarily in response to…I call it a voice, but “a voice” has sounds...or sounds as though it has something to do with hearing. And I didn’t hear anything. I think it’s the sort of hearing that you can’t really describe. It doesn’t have anything to do with ears, or waves hitting a drum or anything on that order. I don’t really know, I think maybe I’m using the wrong word when I say “hear.” I sort of recognized it, it was very rapid, I could even....if I didn’t catch a phrase, I could sort of say, “Would you mind doing that again?”
  • Helen Schucman (1976), in interview by David Hammond August 1976 in Belvedere, California. Quoted in: The Voice: A Historical Moment with Helen at acim.org. Accessed May 21, 2014. Also online ar merelyacim.wikispaces.com.
  • In answer of question: "Regarding the voice you heard in the scribing A Course in Miracles, did it come from outside or from within?"

• I am a very careless person in some ways, I lose everything. But I never lost anything of this Course. People would would stop me in the subway and say, “Miss, you forgot your something or other, and hand it back to me.” Taxis would honk their horns, you know and say, “You left something in the back seat.” My secretary would say, “Are you sure this belongs in this case report, it doesn't sound right?” It was impossible to lose this Course, and I tried. But it...followed me around in an odd kind of way. People would send it back to me, anything. And I always got it back. We never lost anything, which is incredible.
  • Helen Schucman (1976), in interview by David Hammond August 1976 in Belvedere, California. Republished in: "An interview with Helen Schucman" at merelyacim.wikispaces.com. Accessed May 21, 2014.

• "I saw myself entering a cave in a rock formation on a bleak, windswept seacoast. The entrance to the cave was low, and the cave was quite deep. All I found in it was a very old and large parchment scroll. Its ends were rolled around heavy, gold-tipped poles, the two sides touching at the scroll's center and tied together by a strip of parchment that fell away as my fingers touched it. I untied the ends and opened the scroll just enough to expose the center panel, on which only two words were written; 'God is', and nothing else. …"

  As with the subway experience several years earlier, an aspect of the cave experience likewise found its way into the Course. The workbook states: "We say 'God is', and then we cease to speak, for in that knowledge words are meaningless" (W-pi. 169.5:4).

  • Kenneth Wapnick: Absence from Felicity: The Story of Helen Schucman and Her Scribing of A Course in Miracles

A Course in Miracles

• The course does not aim at teaching the meaning of love, for that is beyond what can be taught. It does aim, however, at removing the blocks to the awareness of love’s Presence, Which is your natural inheritance. The opposite of love is fear, but what is all encompassing can have no opposite.
  • A Course in Miracles, p. 1 (1976)

• The purpose of time is to enable you to learn how to use time constructively. It is thus a teaching device and a means to an end. Time will cease when it is no longer useful in facilitating learning.
  • A Course in Miracles, (1976)

• Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.
  • Course in Miracles (2000) by Helen Schucman and William Thetford, Ch. 16 The Forgiveness of Illusions, p. 162

External links

• A Course in Miracles Text - 1972 Edition