ACIM Urtext Help Guide
About this Edition
This website hosts the A Course in Miracles Urtext online edition. This material represents an early draft of the course, dictated by Jesus and scribed by Helen Schucman and Bill Thetford.
Bill typed-up Helen's shorthand notes, with some editing applied, producing the urtext draft. The urtext was later re-edited more than once to become the official edition. The original urtext was transcribed to digital text years later.
The urtext material was published in the book The Urtext Manuscripts by Miracles in Action Press. Data from that project is used with permission as the basis for this website's edition. The urtext is much less edited than the official edition by the Foundation for Inner Peace, and includes over 60,000 extra words.
Volumes hosted here include the Text, the Workbook for Students, the Manual for Teachers and Use of Terms (later "Clarification"). Also two supplements are included: Psychotherapy - Purpose Process Practice and The Song of Prayer. Additionally included is a portion of Helen's book The Gifts of God, and a Special Message regarding Jesus's physical resurrection, both believed to be dictated by Jesus.
All ACIM material is reproduced with written permission from the Foundation for Inner Peace (acim.org), and the Foundation for A Course in Miracles (facim.org). Original typing, including errors, formatting, layout, capitalizing etc are preserved. Note that uppercase words were originally intended to become italics, but still represent the original emphasis. Spelling may also have been corrected in the transcription from type-written to digital text.
Workbook lesson 361 is usually repeated through to 365, without the use of separate pages. In this edition, each lesson has its own dedicated web page. This is purely for website and navigation purposes.
In the Workbook, lessons 221 through to 360 are grouped into 14 sets, each beginning with an extra section which has a question in the title. The word "Question" has been appended to the beginning of each title for clarity. e.g. "Question 1. What is Forgiveness?".
Extra headers defining Miracle Principles have been inserted in the first chapter, from 1 to 54 e.g. TMP1: Miracle Principle 1. The original 43 principles in the urtext (still identified by their reference codes) are preserved. Additional divisions from later edits by Helen and Bill (HLC version) were combined with the original divisions, resulting in 54 "potential" principles. These can be ignored if you prefer the original 43. The 43 do not map accurately to the 50 in later editions.
Topical focus in the course sometimes continues past the end of a paragraph, into additional lines. These lines are grouped as one chunk, with a single reference code, because they represent a single thought or idea. In these segments, inconsistent margins were sometimes present. The margins have been removed for presentation purposes, and did not convey meaning.
Chapter and section titles were added in later edits by Bill and Helen, e.g. in the HLC version. The urtext lacked titles and structure, so these have been used for navigation purposes. They may not match later editions. The beginning and end locations of sections may also not match later editions.
The website's images of urtext material are entirely accurate in terms of formatting and wording. The sentence-level images are more stylized in terms of font and size, based on a ranking of word priorities. This is purely for artistic reasons, and may to some degree influence the emphasis of the words. Text formatting such a bold, italic, underline and strike-through remain accurate.
The audio recordings are computer-generated, and speak the exact words of the urtext with no changes. However, some pronunciation or emphasis may not quite match due to limitations in the text-to-speech software.
No other changes have been made to the material or its words.