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.