A Course in Miracles

Manual For Teachers

What are the Levels of Teaching?

Level 1- Casual Encounter

The simplest level of teaching appears to be quite superficial. It consists of what seem to be very casual encounters...

a "chance" meeting of two apparent strangers in an elevator,

a child who is not looking where he is going running into an adult "by chance,"

two students who "happening" to walk home together.

These are not chance encounters. Each of them has the potential for becoming a teaching-learning situation.

Perhaps the seeming strangers in the elevator will smile to one another;

perhaps the man will not scold the child for bumping into him;

perhaps the students will become friends.

Even at the level of the most casual encounter, it is possible for two people to lose sight of separate interests, if only for a moment.

That moment will be enough. Salvation has come.

It is difficult to understand that levels of teaching the universal course is a concept as meaningless in reality as is time. The illusion of one permits the illusion of the other.

In time, the teacher of God seems to begin to change his mind about the world with the single decision, and then learns more and more about the new direction as he teaches it.

We have covered the illusion of time already, but the illusion of levels of teaching seems to be something different.

Perhaps the best way to demonstrate that these levels cannot exist is simply to say that any level of the teaching-learning situation is part of God's plan for Atonement, and His plan can have no levels, being a reflection of His Will.

Salvation is always ready and always there.

God's teachers work at different levels, but the result is always the same.