A Course in Miracles presents itself in three parts: a Text setting out its theory, a 365 day Workbook for Students, and a shorter Manual for Teachers. Helen Schucman, a professor of medical psychology at Columbia University, said that beginning on October 21, 1965 an inner voice she identified as Jesus told her, this is a course in miracles, please take notes, and that she went on taking dictation through 1972. Her colleague William Thetford, who had urged her that there must be another way of working together after a period of friction between them, transcribed her shorthand and encouraged the project throughout. At Schucman's request her authorship was withheld from readers until after her death in 1981.
The Course borrows Christian vocabulary, sin, salvation, atonement, the Holy Spirit, and reassigns it inside a nondualist psychology: the physical world is described as a mistaken perception rather than a real creation, and a miracle is defined as a shift in perception rather than a change to physical events. Forgiveness, understood as recognizing that no real harm has occurred because the world in which it seemed to occur is itself an error, is presented as the Course's central practice. The book explicitly states it is one version of a universal curriculum, not the only one, and does not ask readers to adopt any particular religious affiliation.