.webp){kind=small}
Undo your false and binary thinking and take responsibility for your true and Unified Self: the centre and Source of all things.
Theirs was a love that would never die – or so it seemed. Tomas Vieira and Nouk Sanchez found each other in 1984 and, in 1990, discovered together the influential book A Course in Miracles. Helen Schucman’s course taught them that fear arises from the false binaries of our world, while love comes with the acceptance that all is one.
Growing in spirit and maturity, they co-taught programs expounding on Schucman’s work for over twenty years and eventually penned Take Me To Truth in 2007. However, while promoting their burgeoning best-seller, Vieira developed cancer and died shortly afterwards. In Sanchez’s despair, she rediscovered the consolations of her philosophy, realising that if all is one in love, then we can never truly be separated from anyone.
To this day, Sanchez continues to teach the system they developed together in Take Me To Truth and believes she is still in contact with Vieira, Jesus and the Holy Spirit. Their revelations have been written down in her subsequent publications and continue to inform her teaching at Take Me to Truth, Inc.
According to Sanchez and Vieira, we have built up false oppositions between our individual egos and everything else. These oppositions breed unnecessary fear and suffering because, once we buy into the illusion that there are forces outside ourselves, we give them the power to control, overcome or even destroy us. There is also the danger that we dissect reality into separate slices, anxiously obsessing about events in our past or working ourselves to death for an imagined future instead of living in the one ‘Holy Instant’ of the present.
Our ego has created an entire playground of illusions to keep up the pretence of its individuality and independence. By playing the part of a victim of external forces or the lesser subject of an externalised God, the ego abdicates its responsibility for itself and everything else. Even love, so often idealised as a means of transcending individual boundaries, is manipulated by ego when engaging in transactional relationships, seeking approval from the beloved or being governed by the desire to fulfil bodily urges.
But God did not forge this shattered earth; we did, and we can just as easily return it to wholeness. That’s because we create the world we encounter.
In contrast to the individual ego, our eternal and true Self is one with all people, times and places; therefore, external reality is just a creation and extension of ourselves (‘projection makes perception’). To remember and live from this Unified Self with integrity, we must use tools such as the enneagram or adopt the PIQ formula, which the authors define as ‘presence-inquiry-quantum-forgiveness.’ Using a multi-fold process, it aims to unravel the knots of duality and fear in which we have become entangled.
This sixfold process involves undoing the initial bonds of duality, then sorting what is good and true from what is false before relinquishing those false idols and comforts. We must then retreat into a settling down period of respite followed by one last unsettling period of shaking loose whatever lingering illusions remain. Then, we can finally consolidate these lessons in the divine stage of achievement and unified Selfhood. Seeing through illusion and difference, we not only glimpse truth and unifying love but can also accept that we are truth and love itself. ‘Truth reveals that we are all infinite fragments of the same cosmic mirror that exploded aeons ago.’
A Course in Miracles is one of the most popular and influential texts of the latter half of the 20th century and millions of readers attest to its power. Sanchez and Vieira are two potent instances of this enduring impact with their interpretation and application of the book’s key messages for a new generation. Readers who have valued the work of Schucman will likely appreciate this heartfelt continuation of the same message. And if you have never tackled A Course in Miracles, you should find that Take Me to Truth provides an accessible introduction to its core lessons.
