ACIM and a B-52 Simulator
What do they have in common?
For those who know me, the fact that I was a pilot and flight instructor is no surprise. My license reads “CFI ASMEL.” In plain English, Certified Flight Instructor, Airplane, Single- and Multi-Engine Land. I later added gliders, which, in their own quiet way, (pun intended) may have taught me more than all the engines combined.
But my story didn’t begin there.
It began in an Air Force B-52 simulator.
My first eight hours of “flight time” were not logged. They didn’t count toward any rating. No logbook entry. No certificate. Just me, sitting in a cockpit that looked like something out of science fiction. Instruments everywhere. Gauges, switches, warning lights, alarms. Eight throttles. Eight engines. A machine so large and powerful that the idea of flying it in the real world carried a certain…finality.
And yet, something strange happened.
It all felt intuitive.
Not easy, not simple, but somehow familiar. As if there was an underlying order beneath the apparent chaos. A logic that, once glimpsed, made the complexity manageable.
Still, I was very glad it was a simulator.
Because if you made a mistake—and you would—you didn’t die. You didn’t destroy a billion-dollar aircraft. You didn’t end a career before it began. You simply reset, reviewed, and tried again.
And that, to me, is where the real connection to A Course in Miracles begins.
The Course teaches that this world is, in a very real sense, a kind of simulator. Not in the technological sense, but in purpose. It is a learning environment. A place where mistakes appear to have consequences, sometimes very painful ones, yet at a deeper level, nothing real is ever truly harmed.
“Trials are but lessons that you failed to learn presented once again…”
That line could just as easily have been written in a flight training manual.
In the simulator, if I mishandled an approach, I didn’t get graded on how badly I failed. I got another approach. If I misread an instrument, I wasn’t thrown out of the cockpit. I was shown what I missed and given another chance to see it correctly.
The repetition wasn’t punishment. It was training.
ACIM makes the same point, but applies it to life itself. What we call problems, conflicts, frustrations, even suffering, are not evidence of failure in the way the ego defines it. They are simply missed lessons, circling back for another look.
Just like in that B-52 simulator.
At first, the cockpit overwhelms you. Too much information. Too many inputs. You react instead of respond. You chase one gauge while ignoring another. You overcorrect. You get behind the aircraft.
Sound familiar?
That’s the untrained mind.
The Course would say we are “out of alignment,” listening to the wrong guidance system. In aviation, that might mean trusting your senses over your instruments. A dangerous mistake. In poor visibility, your body will lie to you. It will tell you you’re level when you’re in a bank. It will tell you you’re climbing when you’re descending.
Pilots are trained to trust the instruments, not their feelings.
ACIM asks us to do something very similar. It asks us to question the “evidence” of the world and listen instead to a quieter, more reliable Voice. Not the loud alarms of fear, judgment, and reaction, but the steady guidance of what it calls the Holy Spirit.
In the simulator, you learn this the hard way.
Ignore the instruments, and things go wrong quickly.
Trust them, even when it feels counterintuitive, and everything stabilizes.
Another parallel became clear over time.
Instructors don’t sit there to judge you. They sit there to guide you. To point out what you’re not seeing. To help you correct without condemnation. A good instructor is calm, steady, and patient. They don’t panic when you make a mistake. They expect it.
In fact, they rely on it.
Because that’s how you learn.
ACIM presents a similar kind of Teacher. One who does not punish, does not accuse, does not keep score. One who simply reinterprets what you see and offers another way to look at it.
In both cases, the goal is not perfection on the first try.
It’s correction over time.
And here’s the part that took me years to appreciate.
The simulator is not the real flight.
It prepares you for it.
ACIM takes that idea one step further and turns it inside out. It suggests that what we think is the “real world” is actually the training ground. A place where we are learning to see differently, think differently, respond differently. A place where fear can be replaced with clarity, and reaction with understanding.
And like the simulator, we are given as many attempts as we need.
No one says, “That’s it. You failed. You’re done.”
The lesson simply comes back around.
Maybe in a different form. Maybe with different people. Maybe in a situation that looks nothing like the last one. But at its core, it’s the same lesson, asking to be learned.
I think back to that young man sitting in the B-52 simulator, overwhelmed and yet strangely at home. I didn’t know it then, but I was learning more than how to manage eight engines and a complex cockpit.
I was learning how to trust guidance beyond my immediate perception.
I was learning that mistakes are not the end of the story.
And I was learning that repetition is not failure. It is grace in disguise.
If I had understood then what I am beginning to understand now, I might have approached both flying and life a little differently. With less tension. Less urgency to “get it right” the first time. And more willingness to learn from what appears to go wrong.
Whether in a B-52 simulator or in the classroom of the mind, the principle is the same.
You are not being tested.
You are being trained.
And nothing real is at risk.