"What It Says": From the Preface of A Course In Miracles

This book is a more recent contribution from Ken Wapnick, but in a lot of ways, next to A Talk Given, it may be one of the more suitable "introductory" books available from his hand, which is the main reason for including it in the reading list in my book. At the same time it is also a very useful recap for long time students.

In short, while I don't believe I quoted this book specifically in Closing the Circle, I included it in the reading list with the thought that it is highly suitable "for further reading." My book tries to be accessible for both people who had not known of the Thomas gospel before as well as for people who had not heard of A Course In Miracles before, in effect bringing the two together. Along those same lines the bibliography is trying to be helpful towards the next step to take. Simply put, if you weren't already a student of A Course In Miracles, it is a bit harder to really see the coherence of the Thomas message in the spirit of Pursah's commentaries to it, and it helps to have that frame work, and this booklet of just 75 pages, which covers the third section of the Preface to the Course is very comprehensive indeed. In fact the only word for it is exhaustive, but in Ken's inimitable style it manages to be not exhausting, but a gem. Ever since his involvement with Helen Schucman in the editing of the Course manuscript, Ken has emerged as the leading teacher of the Course, simply because he does not mix in anything else. He is a very literate person, and can and does draw from his extensive knowledge of literature and music, not to mention psychology, but his fundamental approach always is to explain the Course in it's own terms, without mixing in anything external, except for an example that can help us on our way to integrate this material. He is at it again in this book. It should be noted that in most cases, to write a 75 page booklet about 4 pages of text might seem to be overkill, but the reason it is not is that truly in these 4 pages all the seeds are planted which will flower subsequently in the 1400 pages of the Course itself, and the commentary of this book helps us to see that, for otherwise we might read right over it.

Ken compares this section to the overture to a symphony, or the prelude to an opera, and his commentary makes it clear in detail how essentially all the major themes of the Course's teaching are present in this section, and the groundwork is laid for a more exhaustive treatment later on in the text. So the foundation that is laid here begins from the beginning, which is the distinction of the Level One teaching of the Course, which is introduced with the famous lines, summarizing the Course teaching from the Introduction to A Course in Miracles:

Nothing real can be threatened.
Nothing unreal exists.
Herein lies the peace of God.

It seems so simple, but most of our lives we don't get the obvious, since the ego is all about complexity. To my mind these lines always seem to be a corollary to an old Dutch saying, which in translation would sound as follows: That's why we suffers mostly here, from the suffering we fear, (My translation is slightly poetic, to preserve the rhyme, here it is in Dutch: Daarom lijdt de mens het meest van het lijden dat men vreest). The peace of God thus depends on the ability to tell apart truth and fiction, for our suffering is entirely in the realm of the illusory ego-world of projection, and the truth or realith in us can never be affected or changed by anything external. Learning to understand that viscerally is the bridge that Jesus or the Holy Spirit lead us across if we practice the teachings of the Course, which are the teachings of Jesus in modern form. The next issue which this section of the Course then addresses, is the level of our experience, so if Level One is about the abstract understanding of the difference between Heaven and the world, Level Two is about the level of our daily experience, and learning to tell the ego and the Holy Spirit apart, and learning to choose the miracle of forgiveness instead of the ego's pain.

Throughout this little book Ken connects the abstract concepts of the Course in many ways to our practical experience, such as showing how the scarcity principle, which as an expression occurs only in this section of the Preface (though the words scarcity and lack appear throughout the Course to indicate the fundamental nature of the ego thought system), finds expression in such experiential "facts" of life as addictions (never enough of xyz), and blackholes, which seem to vacuum up matter, which disappears into nothingness at that point. Evidently it is again no accident that not only were Helen and Bill, who collaborated in writing down the Course psychologists, but so is Ken, and his profound ability to help us connect the Course's teachings to our daily experience, with complete intellectual integrity is his abiding contribution to the teaching of the Course, and this little gem of a book will no doubt be helpful to many.