ACIM Manual For Teachers

The curriculum that you set up is therefore determined exclusively by...

what you think you are, and what you believe the relationship of others is to you.

In the formal teaching situation, these questions may be totally unrelated to what you think you are teaching. Yet it is impossible not to use the content of any situation on behalf of what you really teach and therefore learn.

To this the verbal content of your teaching is quite irrelevant. It may coincide with it or it may not. It is the teaching underlying what you say that teaches you.

Teaching but reinforces what you believe about yourself. Its fundamental purpose is to diminish self doubt. This does not mean that the self you are trying to protect is real.

But it does mean that the self you think is real is what you teach.

This is inevitable. There is no escape from it. How could it be otherwise?

Everyone who follows the world's curriculum, and everyone here does follow it until he changes his mind, teaches solely to convince himself that he is what he is not.

Herein is the purpose of the world. What else, then, would its curriculum be?

Into this hopeless and closed learning situation which teaches nothing but despair and death, God sends His teachers. And as they teach His lessons of joy and hope, their learning finally becomes complete.

Except for God's teachers, there would be no hope of salvation, for the world of sin would seem forever "real."

The self-deceiving must deceive, for they must teach deception. And what else is hell?

This is a manual for the teachers of God.

They are not perfect or they would not be here. Yet it is their mission to become perfect here, and so they teach perfection over and over in many, many ways until they have learned it. And then they are seen no more, although their thoughts remain a source of strength and truth forever.

Who are they? How are they chosen? What do they do? How can they work out their own salvation and the salvation of the world?

This manual attempts to answer these questions.