Apparently it was trance channelled to some woman in 1975,
So she claims, and that should tell you all you need to know about it. The woman was Dr. Helen Schucman who was a research psychologist at Columbia University during the 60s and 70s. From '65 to 72 her and a fellow psychologist authored the CIM.
What it is is a series of three books, a text, a workbook, and a teachers manual. It’s designed to be an ongoing course that takes a year or more to complete. Its center focus is on learning to forgive, and through perfecting that skill, one is better able to see/appreciate a more “miraculous” existence. Sounds pretty good so far.
But like much of this sort of material, private revelation gives way to private redefining. This is the sort of stuff that appeals strongly to New Age and New Thought religions, because the terminology of established faiths are used, but there the similarity ends. The reason you felt like you were having a parallel conversation is because you were. You were using the same words but to each they meant different things.
My friend kept gushing about having finally found the authentic voice of Jesus.
Now I don’t know your friend, but I offer this analysis so you can hear it from someone you don’t know and put it to the test by comparing it to what you know of your friend. I would speculate that your friend is the sort who is put off by established religions, and the reasons could be few or many but will center on the notion that they are “too dogmatic” or “too rigid.” When you get to the essence of it, it really boils down to they don’t like the idea of sinning and having to pay for it in some way, either by suffering with their guilt or seeking traditional (depending on the faith) methods of forgiveness. For Catholics, that would be Reconciliation.
The appeal of this material, as well as many of the “New” type religions (and I use that term loosely) is that they reject the traditional notion of sin having, if you will, a horizontal (against a person) and a vertical (against God) component. They place God as a spirit that lives in each person, be they good, bad, or indifferent. Sort of like white blood cells are in humans no matter who they are.
As a consequence, “sin” becomes a mere mistake, as though you “temporarily” forgot that “Divinity within you” when you [fill in your sin here]. Thus when it comes to forgiveness, you still must square it with the person whom you injured, but the “vertical” part of it becomes a matter of you promising yourself not to do it again.
Now I am greatly simplifying this for sake of clarity, but I think you get the picture. The idea of a Creator God becomes some kind of psychic “force” that the individual projects, an “energy,” rather than a true Divine Being. God the Father is replaced by Universal Love, so it follows that the more forgiving one is, the closer in love they are to this Universal Love. In Christianspeak, we would say we deepen our personal relationship to God. Since their “God” is not a Being, there is no personal relationship substance, only a better “feeling” of being connected with (not God, but) “all things.”
Does it have any value? I suppose that depends on who you are. If you were a person who had no religion and no background in any religion, AND you had social problems centering on human relationships, I suppose for those it would be helpful. For any Christian I don’t see how you could accept the teaching, given that it takes the terminology of Christianity and applies it to mysticism and far eastern religious ideas. If you know anything about Jungian psychology, you’ll immediately recognize many of his ideas in the course. That should be expected; Schucman and Jung were in the same field and had very close to the same beliefs.
And I’ll add one other thought, a question, and leave it for you to ponder as you consider the worth of such a course.
If Jesus TRULY revealed Himself to YOU, regardless of his revelation to you, how much would you charge people to access it?
