How Un Cours d’Amour

Led Me to Embrace Life

When I first laid eyes on the English-language book A Course of Love, I knew I had discovered a treasure. Immediately I wanted to shout from the rooftops of my good fortune. I wanted to share my treasure with the whole world. Imagine! A course entirely devoted to love!

Quite spontaneously I began to translate the book into French, first for myself and for my friends, and after all kinds of unpredictable turns, I continued to translate the manuscript with even greater care for those who thirst for truth. If you are like me, when you feel the truth in a book, you underline the passages that resonate. But here, the truth is felt with every sentence! This phenomenon raised in me a passion and an enthusiasm that never diminished throughout the days I dedicated to this exceptional document. It was a unique experience! The intensive hours I spent with this celestial wisdom—some 3,000 hours—initiated in me a metamorphosis that is going on and will go on.

And now Un cours d’amour has just come off the presses at Editions Le Dauphin Blanc in Quebec, Canada. It is a precious gift to French-speaking people everywhere. In it we learn that love cannot be taught, but it can be recognized. We learn that love is what we are. We learn that the heart—our own heart—knows and fully understands that love is who we are. We learn that if we remain faithful to the feeling of the heart, we will be advised and guided flawlessly.

The author who dictated A Course of Love is the same as the one who dictated A Course in Miracles. How do we know? Many times the author refers to himself in the first person. He describes his personal experiences and the events that took place 2000 years ago that changed the world. When he speaks, one cannot mistake the authenticity of his character. Mari Perron, the person who first received this dictation, says that an inner voice—“thoughts she did not think”—came through her for three years (1998-2000). She recognized it as a Voice other than that of the usual ego. She knew very well that this Voice was not that of her split mind. One can recognize the same phenomenon that occurred in the 1960s-70s, when Jesus revealed himself in the same way to Helen Schucman.

But there is no need to be familiar with A Course in Miracles to enjoy the astonishing revelations of A Course of Love! If you feel the call of your heart to read it, if you feel attracted to the book, do not resist, it’s as simple as that. The author suggests that you read it with your heart, for the heart has its own intelligence, as science is discovering it right now (see the fascinating video of David Malone – Heart vs Mind: What Makes Us Human – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6bH8gQezrws). It says in the film that scientific books must be rewritten to reflect the current reality, because the heart is more than just mechanics. As Jesus said in UCDA/ACOL: The heart is more than the pump that functions as part of the body. Jesus is saying, in essence, “Listen to your heart, enter the embrace. This Course will transform you by means other than those that are usually used. A seed is planted, let it germinate. Let your heart drink from the Source.”

Each day I feel a subtle change taking place, as well as the voice telling me I have nothing to do other than be willing to accept this gift. We are here in an out-of-this-world process, the process of the caterpillar slowly becoming a butterfly. Gradually, slowly, I began to let go of the bitterness that held a place in my heart, the sour ingredient coming from contemplating misery and suffering, my own and that of others. It is giving way to peace. Thanks to this incredible experience I’ve been living, I am able to say that UCDA has the same potential to transform every sincere and open-hearted reader. This course must simply be read in wholeheartedness, a term frequently used by UCDA, meaning that the mind is joining with the heart. It becomes one with the heart.

In this extraordinary document, the author has done more than answer the questions that arose from my study and interpretation of A Course in Miracles; he actually gave me a comprehension and access to unity, ending the alleged separation of God. This is not nothing! I was on the outs with God! Like many Quebecers who have experienced Quebec’s Quiet Revolution during the sixties, I am one of those who chased the religious from schools and replaced them with lay people. We deserted the churches and those religious men and women who were our educators for many centuries. We divorced religion and government. We would no longer let ourselves be brainwashed by all kinds of beliefs which solve nothing and enrich the clergy!

Yet we threw out the baby with the bath water. I hated God for allowing all this misery and these torments. Since these things are discussed in depth in UCDA/ACOL, it gave me an opportunity to discern and to discriminate the truth from the lies, right mind from false mind. I reconnected with faith and hope. When I learned the way, the truth, and the life from a man who never died, that God is my own Self and that I am bound forever with Him, that I am both Created and Creator, then everything changed in my vision. I became Cause; the hell or heaven of this world is merely an effect.

Before UCDA, I could not see what was the purpose of God. And even less religion, the opium of the people according to Marx. To come to know myself, or to grow in wisdom, I was inclined to turn to the spirituality of the New Age, the new paradigm of the Age of Aquarius, and to the many teachers in self-help and personal development, or the gurus of transpersonal psychology which reveal the powers of the subconscious and the secret to finding happiness and abundance. I traveled from east to west and north to south. I closely followed these authors, teachers, and gurus. It was an essential step in my life.

Who I am, where do I come from, where am I going? How and where do I find my own power? Why life? Why death? Seen from the exterior, my family and friends would say that I managed my life well. Indeed if success means to have the opportunity to live intensely, I did succeed. But why this eternal dissatisfaction, this perpetual discontent? The big question still remained: How to become Cause and Master of my destiny?

Today, I could talk for hours of amazing discoveries I found in Un cours d’amour, especially those who have reconciled me with the Self—my own single Self, different yet the same as all others. In fact, I discovered my being, my Identity. A Course in Miracles had explained that my true Identity was not the separated, illusory ego. But A Course of Love goes much further. It says that everything is related, nothing is ever separate, and I have to feel the truth of this in order to live in the world in peace and harmony. It taught me how to let myself guided by the heart—the way to respond effectively and authentically to each situation. It taught me how to be real, how to be me and stop reacting on autopilot, conditioned by my culture and my upbringing. Today I realize—realize in the sense of making real—that we are at the beginning of the end of “victimhood” because we truly are Cause. My quest has finally reached beyond my wildest dreams and imagination.

Un cours d’amour/A Course of Love will delight many people who do not know where to turn to their existential questions: Why so much misery, hatred and contempt? If it is true that God is Love, why does he let these calamities happen? Why war and the innocent children caught in it? Is God without heart? Or does God simply not exist? If, as stated by those who claim to be liberated and free from ego, we are the Son of God, the holographic fragments of God, could it be that we, out of ignorance, are causing this chaos? If we are both human and divine, do we, or do we not, have the power to create anything other than hell, and maybe even heaven on earth?

A Course of Love repeatedly said that love cannot be taught. We love and it is the path. Healing comes through living love, not just the thought of it. We heal our fears and bitterness when we accept the grand experiment of living the experience of love in relation in every sacred instant. ACOL/UCDA explains what love is, and especially what love is not. It answers the questions: Why live if it is only to suffer and die? Does life make sense? If so, what is the meaning of life? This is a fascinating book, indeed! A book that takes me in the embrace of the Universe, a book that is an essential part of my life . . . for Life.