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.
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.
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