First Things First; Forgiveness is the New "F" Word

So that was the week that was, a week on board the MS Westerdam in the Caribbean with workshops with Gary Renard - the Happy Dream Cruise. In part it was familiar material, and in part a look ahead to the new book, which I already knew somewhat, since I'm translating it, and had seen about half of it beforehand. Any time left over was filled with endless jokes. Besides the fact that Gary definitely delivers his material in everyday language, or vernacular as he likes to call it, he also definitely is a constant reminder that laughing about ourselves is the best medicine, à la the well-known joke that seriousness causes reincarnation. I identify with it, because he picks up jokes wherever he goes, as a matter of course with his workshops; I myself used to be in a trading business, where we spent days on the phone, and telling jokes was part of the routine. So you go through these phases that you know a lot of them, but it's only now that I'm starting to realize how seriously important it is to not be too damn serious, for that is exactly what the ego wants that we take all this completely seriously. If we start laughing about it, soon the game is up! It is not for nothing that Jesus says in the Course:

In gentle laughter does the Holy Spirit perceive the cause, and looks not to effects. How else could He correct your error, who have overlooked the cause entirely? He bids you bring each terrible effect to Him that you may look together on its foolish cause and laugh with Him a while. You judge effects, but He has judged their cause. And by His judgment are effects removed. Perhaps you come in tears. But hear Him say, "My brother, holy Son of God, behold your idle dream, in which this could occur." And you will leave the holy instant with your laughter and your brother's joined with His. (ACIM:T-27.VIII.9)

In short, once we realize that it's our own stupid little mistake, the Course's "tiny, mad idea" of the separation thought which is the cause, and is reflected in the hellish experiences we go through from time to time, we can never take them as seriously ever again. And so Jesus in the Course asks us to laugh at it all with him, which lets the air out of the ego's balloon very quickly. And in that spirit Gary's jokes are completely an integral part of his delivery, lest we start taking ourselves too seriously.

Funnily enough, the piano player on the ship, Bob, who our whole group enjoyed, and who joined two of the workshops, ended up being "suspended," because some passenger felt that he'd said something untoward. So just when he started to learn about forgiveness, he had one huge forgiveness opportunity show up for himself, and he took it in good spirit, and when we found out, we got him to join us for our farewell gathering after our last supper on this trip. I hope the management saw that some of the passengers did appreciate him. In any case, while Gary's style is certainly unique to him, even in the Course there are numerous word plays, and certainly if you read the biography of Helen Schucman, it is quite evident how Jesus has a marvelous sense of humor. Some of us are fortunate to realize that in our own life as well from time to time. So more humor is definitely a good thing, even more so in the difficult times we are experiencing. God forbid we take it seriously, that would really make it unbearable.

The pun on forgiveness as the new "f" word is in Disappearance of the Universe.

Well, it's time to re-read Moby Dick. I've been promising myself to do so, but I think I finally will. When I read Jed McKenna's book, Spiritually Incorrect Enlightenment, which in some ways is a commentary to Moby Dick, I realized that it was too long ago since I read the book.

Jed's treatment of the book is absolutely refreshing, and is completely in line with the tenor of all of his books, which are full of humor, and make you want to throw the majority of would-be spiritual literature into the dumpster - oh what a relief! Let's have a sense of humor, folks!

Fundamentally, McKenna proposes that the Ishmael character in Moby Dick, who is the ostensible author, represents the observer aspect of the mind. He is there at the outset, and he survives the wreckage in the end, thus learning how the ego's self-destruction amounts to naught. In terms of the Thomas gospel, it is thus a reminder of saying 42 "Be passersby," or, in terms which A Course in Miracles would use, accustom yourself to the view from above the battleground (see ACIM:T-23.IV), where you're watching the action instead of haplessly thinking you are the action, this is the way to freedom for it helps us not to get taken in by the ego's drama, and making room for the discovery of who we really are, the dreamer of the dream (ACIM:T-27.VII), and not the hero of the dream (ACIM:T-27.VIII). To put it a different way, by identifying with the hero of the story, we forgot we were the director of the movie, and we end up believing our own lies, and by getting witnesses for my story, I try to keep myself convinced that it is real, i.e. I keep myself from waking up. Conversely the moment of waking up is a quiet one, in the eye of the storm, when we realize that all of the ego's death and destruction is just nothing, the blood is red paint, and by realizing that we realize this it just follows that we're not our ego. And this is certainly one reason that any attempt to help others by preventing the suffering prolong the agony, and thus does not help at all, but offers the ego another way out, which is not to say to be kind, cold, and heartless, but it does say don't buy into the story, for that makes it worse. Helping in this fashion is just another case of soft healers making stinking wounds, when the healing lies in our ability to make the other choice in the mind, and thus to know "I could see Peace instead of this." (ACIM, Lesson 34)

Thus Ishmael's realization at the end of the Moby Dick story, that the whole turbulent vortex of the ship going down did not suck him in, but he merely floats away and gets picked up by another ship, represents in a way the realization that it all was "much ado about nothing," to use Shakespeare's words. Seen that way, it becomes clear that Moby Dick is the story of Herman Melville's own spiritual awakening, in which he can see that the whole drama of the ego amounts to nothing, and in the end will "...fade into the nothingness from which it came..." (ACIM:M13.1:2). And so, the whole movie was naught but a distraction, meant to shift our attention from the mind to the world, and keeping us engaged fixing problems, without noticing they can't be fixed because the movie has already been made. The biggest clue for this in most of our lives comes from noticing one day that I set up similar problems all the time, and since I'm the only constant in the story, it may then dawn on us how and why the belief in an ego-identity in fact is the cause of the problem, and we are free to choose to no longer identify with it. Or, as the Course puts it in the Dreamer of the Dream section:

Now you are being shown you can escape. All that is needed is you look upon the problem as it is, and not the way that you have set it up. How could there be another way to solve a problem that is very simple, but has been obscured by heavy clouds of complication, which were made to keep the problem unresolved? Without the clouds the problem will emerge in all its primitive simplicity. The choice will not be difficult, because the problem is absurd when clearly seen. No one has difficulty making up his mind to let a simple problem be resolved if it is seen as hurting him, and also very easily removed. (ACIM:T-27.VII.2)

Certainly, at the end of Moby Dick, it all disappears into the nothingness from which it came, the sea being the prime symbol for the unconscious. It was all a dream, and by accepting the atonement for ourselves, i.e. by learning that nothing really happened, as Ishmael does at the end of the book, we begin to realize finally that by choosing the Holy Spirit in lieu of the ego, we are giving up nothing and gain everything, which is another frequent theme in the Course, as in here:

Son of God, be not content with nothing! What is not real cannot be seen and has no value. God could not offer His Son what has no value, nor could His Son receive it. You were redeemed the instant you thought you had deserted Him. Everything you made has never been, and is invisible because the Holy Spirit does not see it. Yet what He does see is yours to behold, and through His vision your perception is healed. You have made invisible the only truth that this world holds. Valuing nothing, you have sought nothing. By making nothing real to you, you have seen it. But it is not there. And Christ is invisible to you because of what you have made visible to yourself. (ACIM:T-12.VIII.6)

Quispel, Thomas, Juliana, Westerdam - Coincidences and Synchronicity

Hmm... I received my papers the other day for Gary Renard's Cruise, themed after his new book, due this fall, Love Has Forgotten No One, and suddenly noticed the name of the ship, MS Westerdam. Then I started reading Daniel Schorr's memoirs, and in the second chapter "Going Dutch" he described arriving in the city I grew up in, Rotterdam in 1946 to work for a Dutch press agency, onboard the SS Westerdam, one of the old Holland-America Line steamers.

Meanwhile, I'm writing an article about the Dutch Queen Juliana, and about the palace crisis of 1956, concerning her involvement with the "faith healer" Ms. Greet Hofmans. I'm reading Schorr, as part of my research since he originally wrote on the situation as a reporter for Life, but withdrew the article at the urging of Dutch government figures, except that it was moot anyway, since Henry Luce had already let himself be convinced by route of the Dutch Ambassador (in Italy) not to break the story.

Now Daniel Schorr actually had worked in a press agency in Holland, so he was a natural for this story. However, there is also a connection between Queen Juliana and the Thomas Gospel. Now Gary in turn writes about the Thomas Gospel. And in my opinion at least, it is through his work that the actual meaning of the Thomas Gospel is starting to make some sense to me. Meanwhile it was Queen Juliana who helped Prof. Gilles Quispel in 1955 to gain access to the manuscripts of the Thomas Gospel from Egypt, with the help of the Dutch foreign ministry. Prof. Quispel remained convinced to the end of his days that if it weren't for his intervention, the whole manuscript might have turned to dust in the Coptic Museum in Egypt, in the same suitcase in which it was brought up from Nag Hammadi in 1946. Subsequently, Quispel in turn was a key player in the very first translations of the Thomas Gospel, one of which is still sitting on my bookshelf today.

Not only that, but Quispel knew both Ms. Hofmans, and the Queen quite well, and so they all lived through the 1956 palace crisis, on which Daniel Schorr reported, pursuant to which the Queen was forced to sever contact with Ms. Hofmans, but Quispel maintained the contact to the end of his days. So suddenly a lot of seeming loose ends connected, seemingly with me in the middle. There will be more to this story before this year is out.

All the Dumb Questions

Once when Krishnamurti was asked by a reporter what he would think of when the same question was asked for the umpteenth time, he said "tennis." This was late in his life, he might have been ninety at the time. By this time also he felt at times at least, that for all his sixty years of teaching, and God only knows how many books, no one or nearly no one had ever truly understood him. Dr. Helen Schucman, who was the scribe of A Course in Miracles had similar feelings at the end of her life. The Thomas Gospel talks about "hidden sayings" (Logion 1). None of that is elitism, though it has often been misinterpreted in that kind of light. The simple truth is that very few people really want to be bothered with the wisdom of the ages. Too much hassle. As the Romans knew, the people want bread and games (panem et circenses). Don't bother me with the Truth. No need today.

In the Gospels the scene at the end of Mark, when Mary Magdalene tells the other apostles of the resurrection, is priceless. The arguments that followed are equally telling, including the endless disputes of whether the resurrection was of the mind or of the body. What became Christianity adopted the latter position, though some other schools toyed around fairly seriously with the notion that the resurrection was of the mind. Certainly with the advent of A Course in Miracles it could not be clearer that this is the only way that the story makes any sense at all. But again these are concepts which we don't know right away what to do with, since on the face of it we seem to be a body that has a mind, whereas in the Context of such teachings as A Course in Miracles, it is clear that we are a mind projecting a body, and watching the experience of "My life," which is one of many thousands we could have ordered from Netflix, or picked up at Blockbusters. The main thing is we get so engrossed while watching, and we identify with the hero of the story, we end up completely believing we are him or her, oblivious to any other way of looking at the story. The Course however does tell us to learn to look at things from Above the Battleground:

     Those with the strength of God in their awareness could never think of battle. What could they gain but loss of their perfection? For everything fought for on the battleground is of the body; something it seems to offer or to own. No one who knows that he has everything could seek for limitation, nor could he value the body's offerings. The senselessness of conquest is quite apparent from the quiet sphere above the battleground. What can conflict with everything? And what is there that offers less, yet could be wanted more? Who with the Love of God upholding him could find the choice of miracles or murder hard to make? (ACIM:T-23.IV.9)

In short, whenever you get sick and tired of being sick and tired, you may remember this kind of advice. In Logion 42 of the Thomas Gospel Jesus expresses the same idea with fewer words: "Be passersby." Learn to watch what you're doing, observe it, don't identify with it and lose yourself, for that leads you to the way out.

It is only when we don't really like the story any more (our own damn fault for taking out a tragedy, when we could also have picked a comedy for the same price), that we begin to look at things a different way. And then when we find a teacher, like Jesus, Krishnamurti, or the Buddha, who hangs out not where the crouds are, but "in the wilderness," or "the desert" etc. this means we're now turning away for a moment of our ego's bread and games, and we immediately start having questions. This is what I read, when I look at the stories of the apostles, when I read the transcripts from Krishnamurti workshops/lectures, when I listen to tapes of workshops of the foundation for A Course in Miracles. These people are all asking all the questions that we all want to ask. Sometimes we haven't realized it yet, but if we haven't yet, we will realize at a later point that we're asking a question we heard somebody ask at a workshop, etc. Ultimately what will answer the questions however, is if we do so through our own experience, as long as we stay stuck in answering questions, we are really throwing up roadblocks against the experience that part of us wants, and part of us is deadly afraid of. Ultimately this is the type of reasoning which Jesus offers in ACIM: if you're in doubt if this is for you or not, try it for a while, and see if you like it. The great big risk is that you might feel more peaceful. Another important clue is in Logion 108 from Thomas, "Whosoever drinks form my mouth shall become like me. I myself shall become that person, and the hidden things will be revealed to that person." As usual this should not be read literally but figuratively. It is about sharing his experience, and becoming one with him on an experiential level, for only the experience will tell us where words fall short. It is not about the words, it is about a willingness to have the experience, and that means giving up on the ego's next ride (because we already know to expect the same old result from the same old actions), and following him in deed, not in word, and the means for that, as they appear in the Course are the practice of his forgiveness practice, which are a way of switching from the way our ego sees the world to the way Jesus sees it. A way to get out of our bad old habits which are making us miserable. And while we are at it we can listen to all the dumb questions, or ask our own dumb questions, which will only fade away when the experience catches up to us and we finally realize what he was talking about. As I pointed out in an earlier post, in Gary Renard's books he is really asking all the dumb questions for us, AND his teachers help him to experience the answers as much as answering him in words, so vicariously through him, we get the point that it is about opening ourselves up to the experience, instead of closing our minds, thinking we have all the answers.

Role Play, Empathy

I talked about role play in my last post, but there are many ways that we can engage in this, and you don't always have to act it out. One of the simple ways is empathy, truly allowing yourself to be in someone else's shoes, which I assure you will change your outlook on other people, and make you a lot less judgmental. And simply, we also enrich our experience. For one thing I had this strong feeling with Plato, in the times when I was actively reading him, it was as if I was at times transported to Athens to his academy, and of course many themes that are discussed in the dialogues are truly perennial questions of human life.

One of the fascinating exercises in this regard for me has always been to empathize in this fashion with the twelve apostles, being around Jesus. Once you break the mold of the dominant Christian interpretation of the New Testament, and bypass the judgment of many of the apocryphal materials as somehow irrelevant, and you just begin to read for yourself, I think the one issue that stands out the most is how the apostles were attracted to Jesus and his teachings, but in truth none of them understood him completely. This makes complete sense also with the comments that Gary Renard's teachers make in his books, namely the apostles mostly experienced another twenty or so lifetimes prior to enlightenment. And look at the stories, these guys are stumbling around, mostly not getting what Jesus is saying, yet listen again and again and again, and somehow in  their own way after he dies, they seem to know that their time with him was their greatest time ever, and it changed their lives.

These stories are no different from e.g. the relationship of Krishnamurti with the people around him. Nobody got him either. And of course it is always like that, which is why it's true as so many people have said that if Jesus just showed up one day, he would not be recognized, and possibly locked up in an asylum. And mentally we lock him up all the time. As long as we make the crucifixion the main event, in lieu of the resurrection, we in effect confine him to the historical role of the body that played him two thousand years ago in Palestine. If however the resurrection is the main event, then he is still with us now, (and we're still not getting what he says). We want most of all for this world to be good and real, and we don't really have ears for his Kingdom not of this world, that is, not until we are sick and tired of being sick and tired. And maybe just maybe, then we tune in to him, and like the apostles, we may not know what to make of him, but we know something sounds damned good and convincing.

A Course in Miracles makes it clear why we eventually listen. The point it makes is that even at the worst of times we are never quite one hundred percent crazy, for the mind that was in him is also in us, and one day we'll start paying attention to that little spark. Jesus' teaching of forgiveness is the method to allow that little spark to grow, until it can shine away the dark. When first we recognize it, a little child is born in us, and the more we can refrain from telling it who it is, but listen to it as it is teaching us, the better off we will be. And so we will humbly empathize with the apostles, who were only dimly getting who Jesus was, but they hung in there, for they did not doubt he spoke the truth. Now it is also no longer a problem that there are so many versions and stories about him, which contradict each other on many points. Not one of them has the whole story, they all merely reported it as best they could. Logion 13 in the Thomas gospel is very cute on this point, for it raises the issue loud and clear that the world is not ready to hear what Jesus really has to say. That is as true now as it was then. The only one who maybe got what Jesus was saying, Mary Magdalene, his wife, seems to disappear from the scene after playing her role as "the apostle to the apostles." The boys ignore her, and start founding religions, and schools, while she, the only one who maybe did get it, seems to wander off and not leave much of a trail. And as always the religions accomplish only one thing, namely we stop listening to the teacher, since we end up thinking we already know, so now we're telling him what he told us, instead of listening to him. Buddhist tradition has a wise saying about this: "What's known as the teachings of the Buddha are not the teachings of the Buddha." Realizing this, you leave yourself a chance to actually listen when you finally do meet the Buddha. By the same token, if we identify with the apostles in their failure to understand Jesus fully, perhaps we would keep our ears open as well. It might inspire some humility to actually listen. To me, that's the value of those stories. In short, this was not "50 way to leave your lover," but "12 ways to misunderstand Jesus," and, if we empathize with the characters, we may understand our own resistance to understanding what Jesus is talking about, and that is surely the beginning of wisdom.

Russian Dolls

The fun of russian dolls seems to be endlessly fascinating, and one way of looking at it is perhaps, that none of them are actually "it." They all point to each other, and the multiple reciprocal references are the explanation of the whole concept more than anyone doll is the explanation of the concept.

I'm working on that kind of an experience in real life, with my weekly workshops at the Theosophical Society in Manhattan, details here: Course in the City, since, starting March 4th, we made a start studying Gary Renard's The Disappearance of the Universe, which is a format we've tried once, with a chapter out of Gary's second book, and it certainly produced an interesting dynamic. So this time we decided to go thorough all of his work in this kind of a fashion. So this is a chance for the members of the group to experience what it might feel like to be an ascended master... or, at the very least to think about it, and to get in touch with our own feelings about this whole story, much more so than if you're just reading it, and it's Gary's story. When you play it out it becomes your story.

At the same time, taking on these roles allows us to be at different times and places, and identify more with the notion that we may in fact have some deeply hidden awareness or experience of being at different places in different times. So the whole thing becomes a discovery voyage about how the mind works, and the results are quite interesting. It is a seemingly innocuous, but very profound way to question a lot about our self concept.

One of the things which presents itself, is perhaps the faintest discovery of our own feelings about where we were at the time of Jesus. People often have quite significant experiences around that issue, when their own relationship with Jesus in the present is being cleaned up, as might happen when they study ACIM.

Ascended Whatteh Whatteh?

In The Disappearance of the Universe, Gary Renard describes how his teachers, Arten and Pursah appeared in his life, when one day, when he woke up from deep meditation in his living room in Maine, they were just sitting there on his couch and started a conversation.

They describe themselves as Ascended Masters, who just materialized on his couch at that point, purely to be helpful to him. They also explained that in prior lives they had been the apostles Thaddeus and Thomas respectively, but that they appeared with altered names but in the form they would have in Gary's next life. But wait a minute, it gets worse than that, for by the end of the book, they also explain that Gary will know Arten in this life, though in this life she will be a woman, but he does not know her yet at the time when they tell him this. Furthermore Pursah explains that Gary will be her in his next life, at the end of which she will marry Arten, who again is a man in that life, which is supposed to be Gary's last. Along the same lines they also explain that Gary himself thus was the apostle Thomas earlier.

There is a point to all this. This whole Gordian knot of intertwined lives and personalities, who are having their meetings in Gary's living room, taken together demonstrate the holographic nature of our time-space experience, which boils down to this: we do not incarnate in bodies, but rather "bodies"/"lives" are just like movies, projections in the mind, and the universe of time and space is just a virtual multiplex cinema, where you can potentially wander in and out of lives at will. It takes a while to digest all this, but once you do, it is a whole lot more sensible as an explanation for a wide range of phenomena, out-of-body experiences, re-incarnation included. So it is as Einstein surmised, all of time is simultaneous, and past and present are but a figment of our imagination.

In that context the concept of Ascended Masters also starts to make sense. In his book Gary adduces material from A Course in Miracles, which explains the concept, though the terminology is slightly different--here Ascended Masters are referred to as Teachers of Teachers, but the idea is clear: 

There are those who have reached God directly, retaining no trace of worldly limits and remembering their own Identity perfectly. These might be called the Teachers of teachers because, although they are no longer visible, their image can yet be called upon. And they will appear when and where it is helpful for them to do so. To those to whom such appearances would be frightening, they give their ideas. No one can call on them in vain. Nor is there anyone of whom they are unaware. All needs are known to them, and all mistakes are recognized and overlooked by them. The time will come when this is understood. And meanwhile, they give all their gifts to the teachers of God who look to them for help, asking all things in their name and in no other. (ACIM:M-26.2)

These notions have turned up in many traditions, a.o. the Hindu/Buddhist/Theosophical notions of the Mahatmas, or the Rosicruscian notions of the Order of the Holy Cross, (Fama Fraternitatis), the Theosophical notions of the White Brotherhood, and the Chassidic notions of the unknown 36 Zaddikim who "hold up the world," and so on. Typically Jesus, Buddha, Krishna, Quan Yin, etc. are thought included in this group. The notion is actually very simple and straigthforward, if this time space experience is a dream, or in modern psychological terms, a projection, then it is possible to wake up from the dream, courtesy of the process that is traditionally referred to as Enlightenment. It is as simple as realizing that the emperor has no clothes on, and not only is there not there there, but there is no here here either. There is only here and now. Or, as A Course in Miracles puts it, "It is a journey without distance to a goal that has never changed." (ACIM:T-8.VI.9:7) Fundamentally then, the logic is that we only experience this world because we believe in it, and as long as we believe in it, and that with the process of awakening, there comes a time when it serves no more purpose to be here. At that time however it becomes possible to be present in this dream merely to help others, and that presence can take many forms, it can be totally ethereal or it can take physical form as in the appearances of Arten and Pursah for Gary. In the Christian tradition of course the appearances of the resurrected Jesus to the apostles reflects the same notion.

If you recall the story of the doubting Thomas, who wanted to touch the risen Jesus, in order to believe in him, it is kind of funny that Gary (who, as Pursah explained to him was himself Thomas in a prior life), in his book describes how he wanted to touch Pursah, to make sure she was "real." In the literature this mistake is repeated by the famous encounter of Dr. Samuel Johnson, with Bishop Berkeley, in which Johnson wants to refute the Bishop's point of view that the material is appearance not reality. Johnson kicks a stone and his toe hurts, and he famously exclaims "Thus I refute thee." It is however an example of circular reasoning, for the body is part of that same physical reality, and it is designed to operate in that reality, and the example is merely a case of the physical vouching for the would-be reality of the physical, and therefore it is circular and tautological, and proves nothing. The secret lies in the mind that devises the experiment: what is it looking to prove? If it wants to prove that it's projected reality is in fact "real" then Dr. Samuel Johnson was the perfect manservant to provide that demonstration, but the mind that orchestrates the experiment is not itself part of that reality, it is merely something it perceives, by reason of its vested interest in the reality of that reality, since the mind itself projected it.

In the end, this is why the Course asks: "Do you prefer that you be right or happy?" (ACIM:T-29.VII.1:9) So, if the ego is right then its puppet, Dr. Samuel Johnson has a point, but if Jesus is right, that his Kingdom is NOT of this world, or as he teaches in Logion 42 "Be passersby" then this is all a joke, and it hurts more if you take it seriously. Comedy is really the best relief.