The urtext is the oldest acim store typed version of A Course in Miracles. It contains the material that was dictated by a voice to professor, researcher and scribe Helen Schucman and transcribed by Bill Thetford.

The urtext is heavily edited. Many passages were removed because they dealt with personal matters such as sex, homosexuality and selection of partners.
Introduction

A Course in Miracles is a profound and spiritual book that demands that one question every value that they hold about their world. It is intellectually sophisticated in its thought system, and combines spiritual inspiration with deep understanding of such topics as beliefs and defense systems, perception and identity.

It is also a very practical book, offering daily Workbook lessons that provide a step-by-step process to apply the principles learned from the Text. As a result, it has attracted both lay people and academics. While it is not for the faint of heart, once the principles are applied they can bring about profound changes in one's life.

There are several different versions of A Course in Miracles available. One version, called the Hugh Lynn Cayce edition, was retyped from Helen and Bill's original shorthand notes and is the blue official textbook of A Course in Miracles. This edition is heavily edited. It has had many chapters and sections rearranged, and much of the early material dealing with life issues, including discussions of sex, homosexuality, selection of partners, and parenting and children has been removed. It has been shortened by about a third. In addition, there are a great number of editorial changes - including insertion of chapter and section titles in the Text, capitalization and paragraphing improvements, and reordering of some material.

These changes have caused the ideas to be compressed, and it is often difficult to understand them. As a consequence, the same idea appears over and over again in smaller and smaller amounts, and it becomes very easy to miss important points. In addition, there are a large number of omissions and typographical errors in this version that were not corrected from earlier edits. During this long process of retypings, the original urtext draft was lost. In an attempt to make this edition as free of error as possible, it was proofread against the earliest available typed copies of the urtext, which have been carefully compared with Helen and Bill's original shorthand notes. Various editions of the Book of Miracles were also consulted.
Text

The Course in Miracles (also known as ACIM) is a supposedly channeled spiritual psychotherapy self-study book set consisting of a 669 page Text, a 466 page Workbook and a 92 page Teacher's Manual. This website hosts the urtext version of the course, which is less edited than the official edition published by the Foundation for Inner Peace. The urtext is a valuable tool for anyone studying the course, and we encourage you to read it as part of your regular study routine, along with the free Q & A's and Daily Lesson Insights available on this site.

The urtext is a manuscript draft of the Course dictated by Jesus and scribed by Helen Schucman and Bill Thetford. As Bill retyped Helen's shorthand notes, the material was edited somewhat and came to be referred to by Helen and Bill as the urtext. This urtext was then reedited again, and ultimately became the official edition of the Course.

It is not clear what happened to the original urtext material that was deleted from the Course in the process of editing it, but we know that a great deal of explanation about life issues—such as sex, homosexuality, relationships and the relationship between mind and consciousness—did not make it from Helen's shorthand notebooks into the blue offical Course. It is not possible to add that material back into the Course, however, because once something drops out of a Course it usually stays out of any subsequent editions.

As a result of all the retypings and editing, the urtext is a very confusing document to read, and it contains many errors. This website has tried to remove the most glaring errors, but there are still a few scattered throughout the text and in the workbook and teacher's manual. Nevertheless, this is an invaluable resource for anyone studying the course, and we encourage anyone to use it as a reference as you learn the Course in Miracles.
Audio

The audio portion of this edition is computer-generated and speaks the urtext text verbatim. The wording is not changed, but at times the pronunciation or emphasis does not perfectly match due to the limitations of the text-to-speech software. The audio recordings are very clear and easy to listen to, and there are no distracting music or other sounds.

This is the first time that the Urtext has been transcribed into audio. Some parts of the text have been slightly stylized in terms of font and size, based on a ranking of word priorities which may affect the weight of certain words. Other formatting such as bold, italic, and strikethrough has been retained. In addition, the use of capitalization has been slightly reduced in places. This is done to make it easier to read the text in this form.

There has been a great deal of line-by-line editing, although not as much as was done in the HLC edition. More personal material has been removed, and a large amount of the discussion on psychology that Helen and Bill typed up was not included in this edition (although much of it is available online). Several hundred pages were removed from the course as a whole.

In addition, a lot of the early chapters have been shortened. This is because they contain a great deal of shorthand notes which were very personal in nature and would not be of interest to the general readership. They were also written at a faster pace than the later material, and many people find it hard to read them all in one sitting.

All of this editing has resulted in a much shorter book than the original version of the Course that Helen and Bill wrote. However, it does contain a lot of valuable information which is not available elsewhere. Also, some of the more difficult parts of the course were edited out, and reading the original version can help to clarify these ideas for those who want to hear them clearly. The only drawback to this version is that it can take longer to read, because so many of the ideas have been compressed into a much smaller space.
Appendices

A Course in Miracles is a contemporary spiritual classic. It has been widely read and used as a tool for personal transformation and awakening since its publication in 1976. The book’s popularity stems from the fact that it contains truths that are not easily found in other sources and yet somehow feel as though they have always been inside us. The book has been a bestseller for decades because it speaks to universal human problems in language that is accessible to most people. However, there is much more to A Course in Miracles than what has been published. There are over 50,000 words that were originally dictated but omitted from the published version. Early manuscripts also show different wording in many of the same passages.

For this edition, the scribe Helen Schucman’s original shorthand notes have been carefully consulted in order to reconstruct the earliest typings. All retypings of the material have been compared to the urtext to trace errors and omissions, which have been corrected. Extensive footnotes clarify difficult passages, identify unclear pronouns, define psychological terms, point out allusions to things in general culture, and list Bible references. Thirty-three cameo essays provide insight on personal guidance given to the scribes from the source of the Course, which were considered too personal for inclusion in the Course proper. Words that were emphasized in the original shorthand notes have been underlined. In contrast, the inscriptions on Bill Thetford’s typewriter were italicized, but this was against Jesus’ instructions. Words that were capitalized in the original dictation are now italicized, but most of the text has been restored to its original order.

A substantial amount of the original dictation has been eliminated in the process of editing for publication, including the entire first four chapters of the Text. This has left the remaining material much longer than it is in the Foundation for Inner Peace edition. To reduce the length of the Text, most chapter and section titles that were added in later edits have been removed, but the original headings for each paragraph have been retained. In addition, some paragraphs have been split into multiple segments for easier reading.