Your Immortal Reality

The full title of the book is: Your Immortal Reality: How to Break the Cycle of Birth and Death, and for reference purposes on the Yahoo! group on Gary's work, it was promptly abbreviated to YIR. Within the work of Gary Renard, this book is the most important one with respect to the Thomas Gospel specifically, for it is here that Pursah gives us her version of the text, which comes in Chapter 7.  Her presentation lines up well with history. While the Nag Hammadi library was clearly buried around the time that Bischop Athanasius was propounding the Canon of the New Testament, and would-be Christians were turning violent against any books that disagreed with the accepted positions, and therefore around 375 CE. We know from the correspondence with the fragments of Greek Text which we have from a find dating back to the end of the 19th century that the text of the Thomas Gospel existed in similar form in Greek, which would have been the original language, in ca. 140 CE. And circumstantially it is now clear that the Thomas Gospel must have existed as an identifiable collection ca. 50 CE, or within the first 20 years after Jesus's death.

Pursah's proposition is that she is reducing the collection of 114 sayings to a presumed kernel of 70 sayings, corresponding to 71 in the Nag Hammadi collection because of the contraction of Logia 6 &14. Her edits are mostly fairly cosmetic, but for a few cases. In all cases her edits produce a crisper statement, without any compromise, usually leaving off stuff that feels like it could very reasonably be suspect. Her proposed contraction, discussed on page 161 of the book, of 6 & 14 into one statement makes so much sense, that one wonders why we did not think of it ourselves. In short her edited version is very convincing, and leaves off about 1/3 of the collection, of which Pursah says they were generally added later and subject to some amount of correction, and in the process some inner contradictions are removed. In short she proposes, based on her recollection, that these 70 sayings she selects are the ones she can vouch for were very close to the original, going sofar as to say that if you rendered these in Aramaic, you would have just about the words Jesus spoke back then. As I've argued in my book, Closing the Circle, the rest is a personal decision, quite along the lines of the distinction William James made between formal and personal religion: we have only our own inner compass to go by if we want to rely on Pursah's version. I did, and I even wrote a book about it. So for me it's a done deal. One important comment Pursah makes, which should be obvious, but merits mention here, is that quite evidently the Thomas Gospel is not a complete presentation of Jesus's thought system. The quotes are a bunch of pearls on a string, however in the treatment in both DU and YIR, it becomes evident that the string is the thought system of the Holy Spirit of which we do have a very profound and complete presentation in the form of A Course In Miracles.

The book as a whole is a continuation of Gary's deeply inspiring personal learning experience of the Course, as guided by Arten and Pursah. And in spite of all the clowning around he does, giving us so many ways to recognize ourselves in his exploits, he remains thoroughly humble in his overall presentation, presenting himself as just another Course student, but sharing with us just exactly how much it is all in the application, not in the theory. If Gary could learn it, we could too. We may not have the experiences he has, but we can still learn from his experiences, and the implicit promise is that to us all experience will come along the way in forms that we can understand. So it is never about imitating the form, as was the old Christian misunderstandig about the Imitatio Christi, which was the early Christian belief that if we only let ourselves be crucified for our tenaciously held beliefs we would go to heaven. Of course that was never what Jesus meant to teach, and he firmly disabuses us of that notion in the Course. It is always about learning to walk the talk, and Gary's sharing his own struggles with us via these books remains a powerful encouragement that we can do the Course, for we all can identify with him, since we've all done what he's done, and sometimes worse, or at least different variations. But in the process he really works through all the issues we all have with learning the Course.