Saturday, December 13, 2008

A Talk Given by Ken Wapnick

Continuing on the commitment to discuss on this site all of the books which I mention in Closing the Circle, it is high time to talk about A Talk Given On A Course In Miracles, An Introduction, by Kenneth Wapnick. This book is ideal as someone's first introduction to the Course, though for many people today The Disappearance of the Universe fulfills that function. But even so, one of the things you are bound to discover is that Gary Renard also mentions Ken Wapnick as the premier teacher of A Course in Miracles.

I think this little book is indispensable in every sense of the word, for being as small as it is (just 127 pages in a 4-3/4''x7'' format), it provides a truly comprehensive introduction to the Course, and even if you are already a student of the Course this little book can be extremely helpful to you to see the forest, without getting distracted by the trees. By far the most distortions of the Course, which are all too common, happen exactly because of that issue, that people focus on trees and not the forest, and then it becomes very easy to ignore the true context of the Course, and distort parts of it and turn them into something they are not. Gary's second book, Your Immortal Reality, pretty extensively dispenses with many of those issues in a very incisive and to the point fashion.

The book starts with a brief summary of how the Course came into being, which is extremely helpful for anyone to understand. Next it lays out the Course's notions of Heaven, or One Mindedness (i.e. what came before and comes after the notion of separation, and the world of egoic illusion), that's a very short chapter, and rightly so, for we don't understand it anyway. The only connection that we retain to that in the seeming separation is the Holy Spirit as the memory of Heaven, but our relationship with Him tends to be uncertain as well, because our commitment is not wholehearted at first. By far the largest portion of the book is taken up by the discussion of the ego's thought system and its exploits, Sin, Guilt and Fear, Denial and Projection, the Attack-Defense Cycle, and Special Relationships. That this should be the largest section is evident by the simple logic that the purpose of the Course is very much for us to become aware of our ego, and to stop denying it. The long and the short of it is that until we know we are in trouble we are not motivated to get help, and we're not ready to ask the Holy Spirit until we begin to fathom the circular logic of the ego, and realize that we cannot pull ourselves up out of the ego's marsh by our own hair like Baron von Münchhausen. Only when we get that, and we begin to see that the Holy Spirit is not part of the insanity are we possibly interested in asking for His Help.

Equally logically the next section of the book is about the meaning of the Holy Spirit, the meaning of Forgiveness, and the meaning of Miracles. And then finally Chapter 5 is about Jesus and the purpose of his life. This is a powerful finale to this very concise introduction. The point here is that when we start on the Course, the vast majority of us have issues with Jesus. Stereotypes galore. Here, in just 10 pages, we get a quick introduction to the Jesus of the Course, who presents himself to us as our loving brother, who can simply help us because he has already found the way home, and we are just starting to look and have no idea which way to turn. Perhaps one of the key lines in this part of the book is this: "What Jesus did was to live in this world--the world of suffering, sin, and death--and show that it had no effect on him." And that is the gist of the Course's notion that the message of the crucifixion is to "Teach only love," which is a different way of saying that the point is learning to follow in Jesus's footsteps in the sense of these words from the Course, which Ken also quotes "Teach not that I died in vain. Teach rather that I did not die by demonstrating that I live in you." (ACIM:T-11.VI.7:3-4).

Finally Ken also explains in detail that while it is not necessary to believe in Jesus, it is necessary to believe in the resurrection, as the awakening from the dream, i.e. the awakening to the knowledge that there is no death except seemingly in this world of appearances. I am quoting his entire paragraph on this point:

Once again, to benefit from A Course in Miracles, it is not necessary to believe in Jesus as our personal savior, Lord, or whatever other words we choose to use. But on some level we must accept the fact that the resurrection is something that could have happened, even though we may not believe in Jesus. Ultimately, we cannot accept the Course, unless we also accept the fact that death is an illusion. We need not do this right away, and we do not have to fully integrate this into our lives, because the moment that we integrate it, we will not be here anymore. This is the goal. But as an intellectual idea, we have to recognize it as an essential part of the entire system. (p.122)
In the end then, Jesus is our model for learning in the sense of demonstrating that our Inner Peace is not dependent on anything "outside," including our body, "outside" here meaning part of the phenomenal world as opposed to being of spirit. And Jesus is present in the Course as an elder brother, who can show us the way home, if we ask, and as the manifestation of the Holy Spirit (the memory of Heaven), and as such one of the most concise descrtiptions of him comes also from Ken, though it is not in this book: "Jesus is a 'What,' that looks like a who, as long as you think you're a who." In other words, as long as we identify with our bodily identity, we will think of Jesus as a person, but when we remember what we are as spirit, we will realize that that is what Jesus was demonstrating to us all along, and at that point we and he are entirely the same as spirit.
 

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