Manual for Teachers

The Manual is not a clergy handbook. It answers the questions a mind asks once it has begun to teach — which, in this Course, is the same as to learn. A teacher of God is anyone who has made a deliberate choice to see another as innocent. The form of the teaching is irrelevant. The decision is the ordination.

They are those who have chosen to teach peace. There is no other qualification. Tenure is measured in willingness, not years. A teacher may not know the Course and still be one; a scholar of the Text may not.

Every encounter is a teaching assignment. Some last a moment, some a life. The Holy Spirit uses all of them. You do not pick your students. You meet them.

Students are selected by the Holy Spirit, not by your preference. Specialness wants a following. Teaching wants whoever is sent.

Trust, honesty, tolerance, gentleness, joy, defenselessness, generosity, patience, faithfulness, and open-mindedness. These are not virtues to display. They are what remain when attack is no longer useful. The Manual develops each as a practical undoing.

Healing is the result of a joining, not a technique. The teacher of God does not heal. The teacher remembers, with the other, that there is nothing to heal in truth — and the body is then free to follow. Forms of healing vary; the content does not.

Healing of the mind is certain when the decision is whole. The body's course is not the proof. The teacher's function is to remember this so the patient is not burdened with the healer's fear.

There is no order of difficulty in miracles. The Manual applies this to the teacher's day: the 'big' problem is not bigger. Treating it as bigger is the only problem.

The Course neither affirms nor denies reincarnation as a necessary belief. It is useful if it helps you forgive time, useless if it becomes a story of delay. Healing is always now.

Death is not a failure and not a triumph. A teacher of God lays the body aside when its usefulness as a communication device is over, without drama if possible. Suicide is treated as a delay, not as a damnation.

Therapy is holy when both come to learn. It fails when one is the expert of the other's mind. The Manual's psychotherapy pamphlet (often studied with it) says the same: joining heals; diagnosis without joining does not.

Prayer is not a request from lack. It is a remembering of what is already given. Forgiveness is the form prayer takes toward a brother. Healing is the result. The three are one motion.

Mind, spirit, Jesus, Christ, Holy Spirit, God — the Course's glossary. Christ is the Self we share; Jesus is the one who first completed the curriculum and remains as elder brother. God is not a person and not an abstraction you can use to hide. The terms are bridges. Do not live in the glossary.

The Manual ends in companionship. You are not sent out alone. The Holy Spirit, Jesus, and those who have gone before walk. The course is over when you know you need no course — and until then, you use it.