Apostolic Succession Revisited

The following is adapted from a post, dated 10/31/2008, which I made to a forum on the Gospel of Thomas on Yahoo.

The notion of the Apostolic Succession is a foundational concept of the Christian religion, particular in the RC church, presumably establishing a lineage of spiritual truth all the way back to the twelve apostles. The concept however in effect is a bit of a contradiction in terms, since spiritual truth is known within, and only needs to be remembered, and it is not discrete knowledge, like an art or craft or some such, which is passed down from father to son. In the following I explore the fundamental level confusion between the spiritual and worldly domains on which the concept is based.

"Religion" is the ego's reaction formation against spirituality, for the simple reason that spirituality threatens the ego. Once the mind empowers the idea of separation and therefore duality, it now conceives of mind as an epifunction of the body, since the original oneness of spirit is a threat to the dream of a separate identity (body). I use the term body here more or less in the theosophical sense of everything to do with a separate identity, i.e. astral, etheric, mental, causal, and phsycial.

This conflict was raging in the early years after Jesus's ministry, and the fundamental difference was about the question: Is the knowledge within everyone of us, or is the knowledge imparted from outside? Jesus knows we are spirit, and that's all he taught, and he knows the thruth is our natural state, and all the rest is made up, or as he puts it in Logion 3, the Kingdom or God's Rule, as it is called in the Pursah version, is within. Paul turns the whole thing on its ear, and puts the body central, which is why he ultimately comes down on saying that, the resurrection is of the flesh. So Paul is emblematic of the dualistic re-interpretation of the teaching of the oneness of spirit, and subverting it to a teaching of separate individuals in the realm of time and space. Since this is fundamentally a lie, it now has the psychological need to seek reassurance, and having made the separate identity the basis of everything, as opposed to the oneness of spirit, it then must turn around and convince others of its position, that is the fundamental feature of the ego (separated) mind, and its fundamental need to proselytize. Since it conceives of itself as separated, it then needs witnesses to attest to its substitute reality, and within the dream it now goes out and seeks reassurance of its position by convincing others, really to convince itself. Note that in the end the outcome in this world is always that some will agree with it, and some won't, and that this does not matter, for it is the dualistic battle about its position which reinforces the notion that separated existence is the basis of reality.

Within this context, Jesus, teaching in parables, tells Simon that instead of doubting, which is the ego's condition (duality), he is to put his trust in spirit, which is the foundation of Jesus' church, namely the oneness of the sonship. In other words the experience of the sonship is only available to us if we newly entrust ourselves to spirit as our reality and our foundation, in that realization lies the oneness of spirit. Paul, c.s. misunderstood this and interpreted Jesus dualistically, re-framing the entire thing around the reality of separate bodies, and instead of understanding Jesus's reference to uniting with him in spirit, they turned it into a game of collecting bodies in a building. So what they heard Jesus say was that they were put into the real estate business, and given a license to market their interpretation his words, and they should go and convince other people of the same thing. In this model, wisdom, gnosis, etc. is also of necessity reinterpreted as something I have, i.e. my body has a brain, and my mind is an epifunction of my brain, and it is capable of acquiring wisdom. Since in their model the teacher dies (on the cross), and he's late coming back (Second Coming gets postponed, because they see it as something of the body, which it isn't), these followers now empower themselves as substitute teachers, in the business of preserving (their version) of the teachings until the real teacher comes back. The real beauty of this business model is that its basic premise can never be fulfilled, so within the illusion of this world of separate existence, it is the closest thing you can get to a license in perpituity, and the defining property is that they declare the truth to be something they have and nobody else does, so unless you join them you're out of luck. Knowledge and salvation are now special.

To Jesus the truth, and gnosis (if you will) is within, and merely needs to be manifested in our experience by living it, which is done through following him to the Kingdom, which again is the oneness of spirit. His teaching then is that since what we fundamentally are is spirit, we may deny it temporarily, but that doesn't change it. And so the split occurs between Jesus teaching the oneness of spirit, in which truth is one, and absolutely universal, since it is what we are. Contrary to that, the emergent religions subvert this teaching into various flavors in which the truth is not one, rather the truth is something separate, which they own, and which they will teach you if you join them. So now a scarcity model is created and a dependent relationship formed, in which you no longer are a child of God, but at best an adopted child as Paul puts it. The fundamental split is then between on the one hand, knowing that gnosis is within each and everyone of us, because it is the reality of what we are and where we come from. We want to return to it to live in the mold Jesus shows us, and what we need to do is join with him in spirit and live his reality, as he demonstrated it to us by his own life. Or, on the other hand to buy the interpretations of Peter, Paul and others, in which truth is a good, which they own and control, and I can only have it by joining them and relying on their imparting that truth to me. So now a codependent relationship is born, in which a "vicar of Christ," i.e. a placeholder for Christ, is the authority to which I must turn, to have the truth, which by myself I do not have.

In this latter model, there is now a need to establish that the "Vicar of Christ" is in fact the rightful owner of the truth, and since the model implies that the truth is a something, a good, which was imparted to a certain group of people by some mythical true teacher (Paul's Jesus myth), the need arises to establish a chain of custody, that shows the world this group are the rightful owners, et voilà there you have the need for the theology of apostolic succession, which you only ever need if you believe as does the emergent religion that the truth is not one, and that you own it, and once everyone accepts that you own it and they don't, you now are on the winning team, and you get to set the rules.

Fundamentally gnosis is the expression of inner knowing, in which we relate to God from the total certainty of spirit (this is the rock Jesus was talking about to Simon Peter), and can merely help each other as brothers to learn to live in that reality more and more. To treat gnosis in the mold of the nascent religious model of Paul c.s., as a good that is to be imparted by specific teachers to specific students is a profound confusion of what gnosis is in the first place, and it is born only from a need to mimic the other guys. The very point is that since the truth is true, and utterly inevitable, the Kingdom is our only reality whether we believe it or not. Thus the only mission is to wake up from the dream in which the separated existence appears to be our reality.

Maddeningly therefore it is only because of the reality of Jesus' teaching that the discontinuity happens that people "get it" outside of a structured tradition, since it is not a linear good, but a truth about the nature of reality in a holographic universe. The reality of spirit is our reality. It is accessible at any time when anybody places their faith on that "rock," independent of specific teachers or teachings, and this is why the church's monopoly on truth never works. They solved this dilemma historically by the system of sainting some people who seemed to speak that truth, usually this meant coopting them if they failed in suppressing them, but again since their very premise is wrong they inevitably make mistakes and saint some idiots and reject some others who were true saints, but were declared heretics by the church, and during much of history were either excommunicated or murdered. The only reason it does not work in the end is because truth is simply true, and is not made by anyone, or any particular institution. This is the same phenomenon which Victor Fraenkel, and the sisters ten Boom observed in the concentration camps, that ultimately spirit cannot be killed or stamped out.

The problem lies that from the notion of gnosis as a direct inner understanding of God, truth, and the reality of Heaven, in reaction to the other groups, religious communities are formed, which end up speaking of gnosis as a something, which it isn't by definition. And again, since there is this seeming discontinuity in our experience in time, it can then occur that Valentinus in the 2nd century perhaps understood Jesus better than many seeming teachers in between, when he spoke of Jesus laughing under the tree while his body was being crucified. So Valentinus understood what the church didn't, namely that Jesus was teaching the reality of spirit, and the resurrection, whereas the creed of the church was based on the reality of the body (separation and duality), and the crucifixion. Thus the early church was--despite the crocodile tears--not disappointed when Jesus missed his appointment (Second Coming), but they were extatic, for that was the premise that kept them in business, and again the business model crucially depends on maintaning the belief that there will be a Second Coming at a future time, for that is their emotional hold on the community they create. It also makes a lie of everything Jesus taught, namely that the Kingdom is right in front of your nose, you just don't see it, because you're looking with the wrong pair of glasses. And the deal that he offers is, is to learn to look with his glasses, and see reality (spirit).

In short, the very notion of gnosis as an incontrovertible inner knowing of reality, that is accessible to us any time because our reality is that we are the son of God, in whom he is well pleased, make it into an contradiction in terms to think that gnosis is something that is to be handed down in some form of apostolic succession. It can't not be handed down, because it is the truth.

Out of the Course Ghetto

There is a temptation among students of A Course In Miracles to seek to congregate with like minded people, and then they naively assume that this means other students of A Course In Miracles. Discovering the fallacy of that notion sometimes leads to quite a bit of consternation. The fundamental conundrum is the same as when Christianity went wrong in proselytizing, and substituting joining with Jesus - in spirit - through following him in his example of living truth, and instead of joining with him, they went about gathering people, and developing the church, which leads to another experience of separation in a different form. The whole thing replays itself when people get hung up about the Course community, as if it actually means something, or worse, they want to select a therapist based on their presumed studies of the Course, at which point I usually turn it into a joke and ask them what they're going to do for a dentist, a plumber, a cobbler, or a car mechanic?

A particularly ugly variant is when in a couple, one of the partners starts working with the Course, and becomes convinced that they should find a partner who is more interested in their spiritual endeavors, and with whom they could do the Course, which is kind of an extreme form of the misunderstanding what the Course is all about, which should really start and end with the idea that it is only about what's going on in my mind, my own spiritual hygiene. It in no way involves doing anything with anybody else on the external level; it is about forgiveness, and the observation of whether someone is doing the Course or not is merely another way of seeing differences, which in turn is just another way of not seeing that the sonship is one, and the ego has us by the short ones all over again. On a practical level, discussing the practice of the Course is usually easier and more productive simply with other fellow travelers on this path or any other path, and not particularly with people we're closely involved with. We will most likely encounter some others along the way, whose experience with the Course may be similar to our own, but since the Course is a lifelong process, and we go through many growth phases with it, the fact that someone else is studying the Course in their own estimation really means nothing. What makes a Course student? Someone who is running around with a certain blue book with gold lettering? Or someone who practices what it says, which you can't tell from the outside?

So the notion of a "Course community" is largely fallacious, because the Course is really a self study program in which the therapist/teacher is Jesus, as a presence within, who is present to all of us whenever we want to. The only real communication lies in the learning from him, by extending forgiveness, and realizing that communication only happens by getting our ego out of the way, and making room for the Holy Spirit. In the Thomas Gospel, Jesus expresses this in Logion 108 as follows: Whoever drinks from my mouth shall become like me. I myself shall become that person, and the hidden things will be revealed to that person. Thus is the only true joining found in entering what the Course calls the Holy Relationship, through which we can experience our oneness with all of the sonship. In Gary Renard's books this is seen as the "J Underground," symbolic of a joining in realizing that there is indeed another way, and that there is a way out of the madness of the world. That inner joining with our brothers through forgiveness is the measure of meaningful progress in the Course, and has nothing to do with anybody studying the Course or not in form. The only meaningful definition, given in the Course, is that anyone who has completed the workbook, is a teacher of God.

Letting go of the superficial notion of a community, as congregating with people, with all its tendencies to ghettoization, and focusing on the inner joining through forgiveness instead, is the first step on this path. On a practical level I've come across this phenomenon in the marketing of my own book--no it's not a Course book, at best it's a book about Jesus, which takes inspiration from A Course In Miracles, from Gary Renard, from the Thomas Gospel, etc. And again I'm encountering the problem in Holland, with the preparations for a new introduction of Gary's books into Dutch, starting with a new translation of The Disappearance of the Universe. No, it's not a Course book; to say so would limit its market. I have met too many people who have found the Course through Gary's work, and between the intriguing title, and the even more intriguing subtitle of "Straight Talk about Illusions, Past Lives, Religion, Sex, Politics, and the Miracles of Forgiveness," this has gotten many people interested in Gary's story. The text on the back also does not mention the Course, except indirectly, although some of the endorsements do. Most importantly the autobiographical dimension is the story of the book, and Gary himself does not know of the Course at the outset of the book, which is the whole point, so by positioning the book as a Course book, one would exclude the larger part of its potential market, as experience has shown. And no, do not read anything into the expression "Straight Talk," Gary voted for Obama.

Category Busting

The experience of this book launch is teaching me some interesting lessons, and we're only just getting started. One of the biggest challenges involves the labeling of the book, which impacts on where it gets seen, reviewed, filed in bookstores, displayed, etc. Some thoughts.

• It's a Course/ACIM book, maybe, but it's really a Gospel of Thomas book, with introductions that provide the connections to the Course, the Christian tradition, and Gary Renard's work, so as soon as you limit it to the Course, it's stuck in a rut already. I now am starting to see readers who had NO previous background in either the Course or the Thomas Gospel.
• It's a Jesus book, undoubtedly, but the term is apt to be misunderstood, for reasons that should be obvious. They are the same reasons why Pursah in Gary Renard's books uses the term "J" instead of Jesus, namely avoiding the religious stereotypes associated with him, both positive and negative, so he can be appreciated in a new light.
  
• It's a religious book. Of course not, it has nothing to do with religion as the world commonly understands that term, as little as Jesus did. He was only framed for founding a religion by Paul and others who came after him, he had no such interest or intention.
• It's a truth book. Perhaps, but that's not a category anybody knows what to do with never mind how you slice it.
• It's a spiritual book. Well, that's a possibility. Spiritual, not religious as the fashionable phrase goes nowadays. Fine. The way I tend to explain the term is that spiritual for me connotes something that is about my relationship to the Divine, and not about anybody else's rules or concepts, let alonge anything moral or behavioral.
• It is a book that invites a new way of looking at Jesus, resting on the twin traditions of the Thomas Gospel and A Course In Miracles. It has a great picture of Jesus on the cover, which by the way is called "Teach Only Love," and was painted by Sam Augustin -- Personally I like this the best. For the picture, which has a total absence of Christian paraphernalia, and represents Jesus only as a presence of love and light, seems to be inviting people in regardless of any familiarity with either Thomas, or ACIM, or anything else along those lines. It seems to make the book jump in people's arms. Although undoubtedly some are also put off by it, if they have issues with Jesus. Tough luck on them.
• It's a book on non-dualism. A bit of a stretch really, for that is not the topic in any overt way, except that the teachings of the Course, and ultimately of Jesus, clearly are completely non-dualistic.
• It's a contemplative book. For sure. I think that is the whole purpose of the Thomas Gospel, to enter a dialog with Jesus and the thought system he represents, and to invite the reader in to contemplate these ideas for themselves, not to mention to turn around and apply them in their lives.

Seventy (One) or One Hundred Fourteen?

That's the difference between the Pursah version, and the Nag Hammadi text. Or to be precise, it's really 71 vs 114, since 6 & 14 are contracted into one saying in the Pursah version, and so her selection of 70 corresponds to 71 one sayings in the Nag Hammadi text. Thus, counting purely the number of sayings in the Pursah version, it covers just 62% of the material. She also adds substantial material to Logion 13 (on page 81 in DU), so that it seems fairly justifiable to condider her version to equate to a good two thirds of the Nag Hammadi version. Understandably however, questions do come up from people about the justification for Pursah's selection.

We have only the statements of Pursah to fall back on, which really boil down to the fact that she claims there was too much corruption in the other sayings. Historically that is a credible suggestion, except that the extant materials make it very hard to figure out what such a kernel might have been, though it would seem that the most "accepted" belief currently is that indeed the Thomas Gospel would have existed in some recognizable form within 20 years after the crucifixion, and many would assume that this was not necessarily the full collection as we know it now from the Nag Hammadi text. And so it remains that we have really only Pursah's testimony as her past-life recollection that authenticates her particular selection. The reader either accepts that or not, that is a personal decision, but some of Pursah's edits and comments seem highly credible. In particular the contraction of 6 & 14 has that "Why didn't I think of that? " feel to it.

Along with that, it seems to me Pursah is not rejecting every word in the other sayings, which she excludes from her collection, but on the whole she indicates, as reported in YIR on page 160, that "the other 44" were later additions. Again that does not state that pieces of them might not contain authentic words etc., her point seems to be only that the 70 as provided by her are totally solid, and the other 44 just were not part of the original collection, the "kernel," and are thus under suspicion of having too much corruption in them. In a more general sense she has indicated in DU, that once you truly understand Jesus's thought system it is relatively straightforward to figure out which ones are authentic and which ones are not. Some people may wish to try their hand at sorting out the chaff from the wheat for the other 44, but that is likely to end up with endless bickering, that is not of interest for the student who is simply interested in understanding Jesus better.

It is these practical considerations which also led me to stick with just the Pursah collection for my book, and not to overly emphasize the NH version, there are already too many books on that one, and they seem to keep coming. This collection in the Pursah version grows on you the more you work with it, exactly because of its coherent nature.

Taking Things Personally

This is the opposite of what Jesus teaches, and in the Thomas material, Logion 42 more than anything else makes the point. It is not for nothing that Pursah in Gary's books calls that her favorite saying Logion 42: "Be Passersby." You get there by realizing with William Shakespeare that "All the world's a stage and all the men and women merely players." (And that includes you, kid! Not to mention it includes me too.)

There is one thing however that we should take very personally, and that is Jesus talking to us, as he does in the sayings. It seems to me many times that the very direct form of the Thomas sayings has that for its main purpose, to get our attention, and to relate to its source as if we were in a direct dialog. Thus to get out of our standing aside, and playing amateur historian, studying what this fellow Jesus said to this other fellow Thomas, as if it had nothing to do with us. Instead, we now have the opportunity to enter our own direct relationship with Jesus, and that is the clue to working with this material, as it is also with A Course in Miracles.

In Memoriam Joe Jesseph

Joe Jesseph made his transition recently, and from what I understood he left us in a clean and non-dramatic way, through an accident with a head injury, from which he was not to recover. He was an organ donor and kept on life support to harvest any organs that were wanted, and his final remains were disposed of through the mechanism of the Neptune Society.
I post this message here as a public service, since people might wonder why his blog stopped (RalphJos on Xanga), and to simply acknowledge my great gratitude to him for his patience and thoroughness, as well as for the book he left us with, reviewing the psychology of the Course in depth and in the context of psychology overall. I am sure the book will be around for a long time. He was a great help to me many, many times, ever since I met him at the Foundation for A Course In Miracles (FACIM) when it was still in Roscoe, NY in the 1990's.

His book, which I list hereby, A Primer of Psychology according to A Course in Miracles, is destined to become practically a standard work on the psychological system of the Course. Being a psychiatrist in life, Joe had the thorough formal training and experience in the field, to appreciate just how radical Jesus's approach is, as we find it in  A Course in Miracles. In this book he presents the Course's psychological system in a formal manner, with one of the key observations being from some of Ken Wapnick's workshops when he says that Jesus would use just one diagnosis, in the formal sense, namely "Son of God, separated type," noting further that our condition is pretty much a textbook case of paranoid schizophrenia, which in the normal medical sense is considered pretty well hopeless, but Jesus' forgiveness program does offer a way out of the maze of illusions. Of course having such a diagnosis in hand, would suggest to us that we should not underestimate the severity of our defenses.

I maintained a dialog with Joe for many years, and I was delighted by his undertaking of this book, particularly also because with my own psychiatrist father I had many interesting discussions on the nature of illness and healing. Very early he taught me that there was of course only "psychosomatic" illness, which was why he chose to be a psychiatrist. He dedicated his life to the spiritual dimension of healing, and I can only imagine he would have been delighted to find a formal approach to the therapeutic system of Jesus, as it is now available from the pages of ACIM. The shift that I witnessed Joe making, and then express through the pages of this book is certainly one that my father was searching for in his life. The transition is that from being a doctor to becoming a healer. All his life my father spoke of the idea that treating the symptoms was not healing, and true healing was making whole, thus expressing what the Course explains with the concept of the unhealed healer, as opposed to the teacher of God/Therapist/healer, who simply represents the thought system of wholeness and healing which Jesus gives us through the Course. Finding the Course I'm sure would have delighted my father, I would not doubt. With that in mind, I'll cherish Joe's book in the meantime.

The Better Angels of our Nature

Surely those words are a very lovely way to refer to the Voice of Reason within. Abraham Lincoln said that, in fact he appealed to this notion in his inaugural speech in 1861, hoping to appeal to the things that united people, instead of dividing them, and I want to quote those lines here in full:

We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battle-field, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature. (Abraham Lincoln, First Inaugural Address, March 4th, 1861)

Evidently, his appeal to higher reason did not bear fruit, but his language was surely inspired and inspiring!

And so people at different times have come up with different words, for a phenomenon that most of us know, and will recognize for what it is, regardless of the name we give it. Names in the Course such as the Voice for God, or Jesus, Holy Spirit, Reason, all are ways to highlight that unspeakable clarity of total absence of any ambiguity, which characterizes the endless rattle of the ego. What it is not is the "speaking in tongues" as it is commonly understood. It is a fully conscious inner clarity which can at times have the dimensions of a voice, but at many times it can be more subtle, as in hearing a thought, more so than hearing a voice, or it can jump out at us from other sources which seem to be within earshot or line of sight quite accidentally. But we know it by the crystalline clarity that sets it off from the humdrum muddle of the ego's traffic in presumed thought.

We often forget we have these experiences, and deny that we have them, just like Helen Schucman complained at times that nothing ever happened in her life (see Ken Wapnick's Absence from Felicity).

The Course puts it all in the framework of Jesus, because it is a great children's tale, and it is comfortable within the cultural framework we live in. As a very young child (circa age 4), I was introduced to him by one Miss Hofmans, who without any doubt channeled him. Much like the Course sees Jesus as the Manifestation of the Holy Spirit, so she would mostly speak of God's Help, with the clarification that he was not like Santa Claus, bringing me what I want, but that the deal with him was to let the Help take whatever form was best for me. Later there were others who helped me in various ways in my relationship with him, which was always an attraction, but never easy. 

In my early twenties I went through a period of intense study, and became fascinated by everything I thought could help me sorting Jesus out from the theological mess that surrounded him. Since at that time I was reading fluent in both Hebrew and Greek, I thought at times that perhaps I should also learn Coptic (for the Thomas Gospel), or Aramaic, because of the many Aramaicisms in New Testament Greek. Somehow I had a growing sense of absurdity about the whole endeavor, and there came a time when I was totally crystal clear that Jesus was perfectly well able to communicate with me in language I could understand right now, and I'm quite clear in retrospect that it was that inspiration which ultimately would lead me to A Course In Miracles, which is in plain English, and one hell of a lot easier than Greek, Aramaic, and Coptic, and not only that, but to top it off, then came along Gary Renard, who gives the whole thing one more time but now in the vernacular, so it reads as easy as the latest thriller. It seems to be only through those sorts of experiences that we gradually learn to trust the Inner Teacher, who is present in all of us, but is just denied and repressed most of the time, as we indulge the shenanigans of our ego. The Thomas gospel, the subject of this site, certainly is one wonderful way of rejoining the original freshness of that voice, and knowing ourselves spoken to directly by him, as if we were there.

On lower Broadway in NYC,opposite #100, there is an inscription in the sidewalk close to Trinity church, commemorating a visit of Queen Juliana of the Netherlands, in 1952, as there are of many other dignitaries who visited New York. Juliana's visit at the time was a beacon of hope to some, but not fondly remembered by others, including her friend Eleanor Roosevelt, not to mention her own husband Prins Bernhard, who entertained different sympathies than she did. She was a deeply spiritual person, who also knew the same Miss Hofmans who I referred to above, and turned to her for advice frequently, to the increasing dismay of Prins Bernhard. At this particular time Juliana was increasingly concerned that the emergence of the cold war, promoted through the Nato alliance, was not a sure preventative of World War III, but rather a disastrous polarization, that might practically ensure the arrival of a Third World War. Some people guessed that her sympathies lay with a movement called the Third Way, which sought an alternative to defuse the building crisis. But it was too much a political movement to suit the Queen. Also, the Third Way may not have been a practical solution. Politically there was a fear that time that it might appear that the Queen went too far in some of her speeches, in effect front-running the political process, which was a no no, considering her position as a constitutional monarch. Clearly the Queen's focus was on the spiritual need for inner peace as a basis of any efforts towards peace in the world. Today. we can look back on the insanity of the Cold War years, including the disastrous attack plans of General Curtis LeMay, as well as the narrow escapes we had, such as the incident with Lt. Colonel Stanislav Yevgrafovich Petrov, the Soviet airforce officer who narrowly avoided nuclear holocaust, in a long string of close calls during that period.


Clearly Juliana's inspiration was to try to find a way out of conflict, and she was quite far-sighted in her concerns, different from her husband, who was illegally on the take from Lockheed at various times, and did not care for her position at all. The Queen framed the issue primarily as a spiritual one. There was at the time even a political movement called the Third Way that sought an alternative to the cold war polarization of the world, but may have been naïve to the same extent Lincoln was proven by events to have been naïve, if you will, by appealing to those 'better angels.' But Julianas approach was more a spiritual one, emphasizing inner peace, and the failure of any real world peace does not mean that the attempt, the consideration, was not an extremely valuable one, and one that reflected an inner choice, and a willingness to look for a way out of conflict. Lincoln got a civil war, and Juliana found herself spurned in her spiritual interests by her friend Eleanor Roosevelt, as well as back home, because she was ahead of the political process, which technically she could not and should not be. Eventually the whole thing erupted in a palace crisis in 1956, in which her connection to Ms. Hofmans was ridiculously played up as the source of the problems, allowing a face saving way out for Bernhard and the Dutch political system, at the expense of the integrity and credibility of Juliana. So Lincoln got himself a civil war, Juliana got herself a palace crisis, but some 15 years later Helen Schucman and Bill Thetford were also looking for a way out of conflict, "There must be another way," pursuant to which Helen found the inner voice of A Course In Miracles, and gave the world a realistic way out of the ego's perpetual war, which has never given us perpetual peace, because indeed it is a way to preserve war, conflict, murder, and sin, symbolized in the world's unending fratricide. (The story of Helen and Bill can be found in her biography, Absence from Felicity, and Gore Vidal brilliantly exposed the fallacy of Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace in his book of that name). We might also note here that for Gary Renard, his inspiration for his spiritual experiences which led him to A Course In Miracles, and which gave the world his wonderful books, also was finding a way out of conflict in his life, as he clearly describes in the first Chapter of The Disappearance of the Universe.

J, or Yeshua, the Jesus as he presents himself in the Course, in a way then demonstrated that what matters is only the little willingness to make that other choice, to know that the conflict of the world is not our home, and to point the way out. In following him we learn to "Teach only love" (ACIM:T-6.III.2:4), by in effect leaving the world to stew in its own juices, and to learn that destruction in form is not what matters, but our presence in spirit is. That is what he gave us and gives us, and those who listen will know and understand that the crucifixion was meaningless, for He (The Holy Spirit) cannot be destroyed, as His manifestation is not who he is, just like peace on earth can never be as long as we keep investing in conflict, and J's teachings are the way out.

On Joining the Y

If it wasn't going to be Closing the Circle, perhaps the title of the book should have been Joining the Y, but while on the one hand the first required a subtitle to avoid confusion with other books with the same title, on the other hand Joining the Y might have been mistaken as a membership drive for a venerable youth institution, so Closing the Circle it is. However, I like the graphical notion of the Y as a symbol for the book, namely that it has two legs, ACIM and the Thomas Gospel, which come together in one Jesus. Just another way of looking at it, but it makes the point that the book is all about realizing that in truth, allowing for different times and places, the voice and the message never changed. This was the real promise of the Last Supper and the ritual that has been distorted as the Eucharist - Jesus promises that he is present to us in our mind whenever and wherever at our slightest invitation, exactly because he is not a body, he is not promoting the cannibalistic ritual Christianity has promoted instead. And the cover represents the one Jesus for all time, who is just the symbol of God's Love in our lives. We got lost, but we have the option of wandering back any time we like, and he comes in at our invitation.

The way it seems to be working out in practice is that the painting, Teach Only Love, on the cover really is the shortcut to the book, and I am gratified to see that it is being picked up by readers who previously did not know much about either ACIM or the Thomas Gospel. The first reports I received from Holland was that the picture practically made the book jump into people's arms. And the longer it is out there, I realize that my collaboration with the painter, Sam Augustin, is really a central feature of the book, and the fact that it's so inviting really is an integral part of the book itself. If a picture is worth a thousand words, the painting is better than any lenghty introduction.

Coincidentally, some people have asked why the two sources of light over Jesus' head in the cover art. Sam answered that in his mind that symbolized the omnipresence of Love, which then was focused in the presence of Jesus. It occurred to me that on some level it could also represent exactly the Y I'm talking about in this post, i.e. the two legs of ACIM and the Thomas Gospel, connecting to the one consistent manifestation of Jesus as the presence of Love.