ACIM Concordance

The Foundation for Inner Peace has a wealth of online learning materials. They also offer a 40-day ACIM self-study program.

The scribes of ACIM arranged the thousand-odd pages a course in miracles of the original Thetford typescript into 31 chapters and a few sections in each. Some of these divisions appear to be quite arbitrary.

The Text

The Text is a volume of writings arranged as a self-study course to bring the student into a consistent state of peace. It was scribed from 1965 to 1968 by Helen Schucman and William Thetford and with the help of a number of others including Kenneth Wapnick, Robert Skutch Whitson, and Judith Sloane. The scribes organized the thousand-odd pages of original Thetford typescript, now known as the Urtext into 31 chapters with several sections in each. The volume includes 361 lessons plus six "reviews".

The Book of Discipline, which is a series of pithy discourses along with three books, helps the students understand and apply the teachings of ACIM in daily life. It is a companion to the Text and provides more detailed instruction. It also teaches the application of forgiveness in relationships and in everyday situations. It has a unique structure which makes it somewhat difficult to read and interpret.

A supplementary volume, titled the Manual for Teachers, was scribed in 1969 and 1970 by a different group of individuals. The scribes were led by the Voice to write an alternate approach to teaching, which focuses on undoing the ego's thought system and opening the mind to God's thoughts. The resulting material is more accessible to many people than the earlier volumes.

Both the Text and Workbook were published in 1976 by the Foundation for Inner Peace. They are still in print and are used by numerous groups worldwide. The Foundation is an educational not-for-profit organization dedicated to teaching the principles of A Course in Miracles and offering support for those interested in studying them.

This online ACIM Concordance enables you to find where words and phrases appear in the Text, Workbook, and Manual for Teachers of A Course in Miracles (ACIMOE) and A Course of Love (ACOL). It correlates ACIMOE-ACOL words and phrases and allows you to see how they relate to each other. Words and phrases are listed alphabetically in the Wordlist Frame and Concordance Frame with the number of times they occur in each document displayed in the latter. Words and phrases that only occur once are shown with an asterisk. The Concordance shows a count of the number of occurrences in both ACOL and ACIMOE.

The Annotated Text

The acim concordance groups every unique word from the ACIM urtext into categories. There are top-level categories and lower-level ones for words that differ slightly in meaning or spelling but still belong to the same group (for example, 'help', 'helen', 'helpful'). Some words may also have multiple meanings within context but I've only assigned them to one of these categories. Words can be found by searching the Concordance frame (top centre) or the Wordlist frame - see the full help file for details.

When Helen and Bill first scribed and typed A Course in Miracles, they did not intend the material to be published. In fact, they were instructed by Jesus to remove a great deal of personal material. They also made many other changes aimed at improving form, including capitalization and other minor editing. The first edition of the Course was printed in 1976 and has since sold millions of copies worldwide. It is now translated into 25 languages and has an active online community of study groups around the world.

The earliest printed editions of the Course contain a few errors and some omitted or misplaced text. These errors have primarily to do with form, such as paragraphing and punctuation, and they are relatively few in number. The original editions also omit some words that were not part of the shorthand notes but that reflected the authors' own ideas or beliefs.

This acim concordance is based on the second retyping of the manuscript, which was done in preparation for the First Printing in 1976. In addition to eliminating a few errors, this version included some new material, such as the Supplements Psychotherapy: Purpose, Process and Practice and The Song of Prayer, which provide additional application of the principles taught in the Text of A Course in Miracles.

This online acim concordance contains only the Text of A Course in Miracles and does not include the Workbook or Manual for Teachers, which were revised several times during the course of publication. It also does not include the Clarification of Terms or Cameo Essays, which are separate publications that expand upon the teachings of the Course.

The Web Concordance

A concordance is a list of all occurrences of the search word in the corpus, displayed together with the words surrounding it. Concordances are a method of visualisation; they arrange the data in ways which can make patterns more easily visible. They are the most important tool in corpus linguistics.

Some concordance software allows the analyst to select particular types of information which will be shown in a concordance, for example lemmas (word classes), tags and other attributes, text type and corpus structures. It may also be possible to thin a concordance output by selecting a certain number of examples for each of the occurrences of the search word; this is often used for pedagogical purposes.

Concordances are a powerful tool but they can return so many results that it becomes difficult to analyse and interpret them. Concordance software can usually be set to display additional data in a concordance, for example frequency lists, word lists or parts of speech. This allows the user to narrow a search and to find examples which illustrate typical patterns of usage.

A further possibility which some programs offer is to colour concordance lines according to the type of text they come from; for instance nouns might be red and verbs blue. This can be useful in pedagogical contexts, especially where the concordance is being used to train language learners in the identification of different forms.

The most comprehensive tool is the Concordance Frame which offers a full set of functionality including KWIC searching, proximity searches, text framing, and lemma analysis. For example the occurrences of the word "world" in the COCA can be analysed to see that it is most often followed by a noun, a gerund, an adjective or a past participle; it is rarely followed by any other phrase.

It is possible to create a customized Concordance frame for individual projects, for example by adding a text box where the project name or other data can be displayed and by changing the font, size and colour of the text. It is also possible to save a concordance for use with another program, for example to generate an HTML file which can be viewed using a web browser.

The Full Concordance

A full-length concordance enables a Bible reader to quickly locate every occurrence of a given word in the Bible. Each occurrence is listed in alphabetical order and includes the book, chapter and verse reference along with a short snippet of surrounding text. Many bible readers find this feature to be essential in their study.

The most popular of all concordances is called Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance. This classic was first published in 1894 and is so named because each original language word has a number assigned to it that corresponds with a dictionary entry for the Hebrew or Greek word from which it is translated into English. When a word is searched, the Strong’s number appears next to the scripture reference and a link to the dictionary is provided, enabling bible readers who do not know the Hebrew or Greek languages to quickly look up the meaning of the original language words.

Concordances are a great tool for bible readers who want to do in-depth word studies. They can provide the reader with a wealth of information including the meaning of original language words in their proper context and help to understand how the original languages were translated into English by the KJV translators. A concordance can also help the reader to discover the thematic connections between bible passages and provide a deeper understanding of biblical themes.

A concordance can be found in a variety of forms from large hardcover books to small pocket editions. The best concordance for you will depend on your needs, so be sure to choose one that matches your study and reading habits.

The Olive Tree Bible App comes with a basic concordance that provides you with the ability to perform word searches. If you would like to add a more comprehensive concordance, there are several options in our online store.

While the app can do cross references, a concordance is more helpful for word studies. To use the concordance, select a word from the text in ACIM, for example patient (Ephesians 4:2). The word will appear highlighted in the Concordance Frame and if you click on it the Concordance will display all the bible occurrences of that phrase along with the reference and a snippet of context.