What are the Top 10 Words in ACIM?

“You can’t know a book from its cover, especially the amazingly generous 1300-page psycho-spiritual teachings of ACIM,” says Andrew Allansmith who has been a student of A Course In Miracles (ACIM) for a few decades.

“I was in serious pursuit of a spiritual awakening. I tried different spiritual paths. In 1993, I stumbled on A Course In Miracles and the other books dropped away in the first week when I started studying ACIM. Since then, ACIM has become the catalog of answers that I trust. I continue to intellectually challenge ACIM, but I no longer question it. I challenge it to bring me the answers. I know they’re all there to release my fixation on being separate, vulnerable and even human. I’m delivered from being human. That’s a limit. I’m released,” Andrew said.

“ACIM helped me let go of the thought that I’m a who. All humans are who’s. Who’s are vulnerable. Who’s have something measurable to lose or gain. What you are in ACIM has nothing to gain because it’s touching everything with your true Identity. It’s a whole different way of thinking about identity,” Andrew said.

“I was preparing for an annual gathering for our study group in Santa Cruz and I got inspired. I was so busy preparing for this gathering. I was doing Holy Spirit as a topic and it occurred to me how many times the Holy Spirit is mentioned in the book. This led me to look up the most common words. About four hours ensued. It happened all at once. I did the research at a mad pace in a single setting. It was so exciting because I had never seen the book sliced this way,” Andrew said.

“I used a combination of internet research and Excel. The course is available in ASCII. I used some software tools for the legal industry, a word count function. Then I realized I needed to combine some words that had similar meaning,” Andrew said.

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These top 10 words offer a quick insight that this long-time ACIM student and teacher finds accurate to the core messages.

Here are the top ten words used in ACIM:

#1        God, Father                           3,192 uses

#2        See, Look                               1,781

#3        Truth, True, Truly                 1,603

#4        One, Oneness                      1,584

#5        Gift, Given, Give                  1,549

#6        Mind                                      1,308

#7        Thought, Think                    1,297

#8        World                                    1,285

#9        Holy, Holiness                     1,281

#10      Real, Reality, Realize          1,264

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“In making the Top ACIM Words list, I had to make some choices. I omitted prepositions, pronouns and such, to get to the meaty words. If I included the word ‘I,’ it would be the clear number one word.  The personal nature of the book and author is obvious with over 5,000 occurrences of ‘I.’ In the first half of the book, that ‘I’ is Jesus almost exclusively, as the author coaches the reader through an understanding of how to release the ego and all of its pains once and for all,” Andrew said.

Here’s Andrew’s take on a message using these words:

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With God (#1) you Look (#2) through the Truth (#3) of Oneness, using the Gift of Mind, to Think about the World’s Holy Reality.

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Otherwise, using your ego as a guide you continue to see its UNHOLY reality.

And here’s a message using them in countdown:

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The Reality (#10) of Holiness (#9) is hidden by the World (#8) until you Think with the Mind that was Given you from Oneness to Truly See God.

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“We could come up with a dozen other sentences using these words. There are so many gifts in this book. After 23 years of studying ACIM every day, I continue to find new powerful mind-healing messages that bring me peace and understanding. One of the gifts is shown by my assembly of these words. I can reconcile the Love of God with the biting tragedies of the world. This is no small gift,” Andrew said.

“The Course knows you are a belief addict and a relationship addict, abusing both with your ego. Using its mind-healing direction by working the 365 daily ACIM lessons, you can see all of your world and every fellow being in it with meaningful thoughts instead of the meaninglessness at the behest of your ego,” Andrew said.

“The real number one word is the author, ‘I.’ I had a shift in my knowledge of ACIM. God is this primary topic. After all the years I taught this book, it still teaches me how to live a better life. I’m more comfortable and happy. And to find out that God is in the book as number one. ‘I’ outnumbers ‘God‘ by a lot, by 50%. The ‘I’ is the author, and it’s not Helen Schucman. I had to surrender to the idea that this is a very personal narration by Jesus about God, about God’s way. It’s God’s way for me to return to peace,” Andrew said.

Andrew Allansmith has been a teacher of ACIM since 2004. He is the Founder of Spiritual Ear, an organization dedicated to making PURE ACIM study tools.

God is in everything I see because God is in my mind. ACIM W-pI.30.1