Aeon Byte Interview

The website Aeon Byte is now starting to promote a recent interview they did with me, which will air over internet radio through the site on 5/30 and 5/31.

It certainly was a fun interview to do, because of the questions the host, Miguel Conner, came up with. He knows the broader background quite well, and this made it interesting, I think because my work is just a smidgeon outside of his "usual fare" - if there is such a thing, for he has a fairly wide range.

Given the topics his show/website covers, his vantage point naturally is gnosticism, and I think it is fairly well a given that A Course in Miracles represents a modern equivalent of gnostic thinking, and many of its students have previously been interested in Gnosis and Gnosticism.

As  a critical note, I might add that in certain quarters the fact that Jesus used some terms that were widely used by the Gnostics, foolishly is thought to imply that he was a Gnostic. This is not the case. It is about as logical as saying that I must be a Frenchman because someone heard me speak French. The budding Church of Peter and Paul, which became Christianity, was in the habit of using the term Gnostics as almost the equivalent of heretics, for by that time the emphasis was already starting to shift towards formalizing their version of Jesus's teachings as a religion, as the world understands these things. In other words, for them, it was about the outside of the cup, not the inside, whereas Jesus taught (in the Pursah rendering: ("Why do you wash the outside of the cup? Don't you understand that the one who made the inside, is also the one who made the outside?" - Logion 89) So mainly the difference between what became the orthodox Christianity of Peter and Paul, and the "Gnostic groups" is about seeing the relevance of his teachings on an internal level, as an inner experience of learning the teachings of Jesus, versus the outer religious practice of what became Christianity, which focuses primarily on the outer level, on the words and the behavior. In short, Jesus was not a Gnostic in the narrow sense, but the Gnostics as a group did preserve certain aspects of his teachings which were ignored or actively repressed by the increasingly powerful group around Peter and Paul. Some schools, such as the school of Valentinus did come very close in their understanding to the way we now see his thought system in A Course in Miracles. I believe that it is this circumstance why many people who study the Course in this lifetime, have some form of past-life memories of being around at the time of Jesus, and very often in a gnostic context.