ACIMExplained Interview by Ken Bok

This was a very nice interviewing experience, it flowed naturally like a dialog, and hopefully this gives people another way of looking at the book, Closing the Circle: Pursah's Gospel of Thomas and A Course in Miracles and helps clarify the position of the book of Thomas in the overall scheme of things a bit further.





If there was anything I would have liked to have added, that might be the consideration that whereas Thomas Jefferson (and many others) certainly had a point historically in fingering Paul as having distorted the teachings of Jesus, Jesus does not take any issue with Paul, just as much as he does not take issue with Judas, because his teaching is forgiveness, not judgment. In the Course, Jesus corrects many Christian theological terms and notions and clarify what the original meaning of his teachings was, and at times he even quotes from Paul's work where he does offer more right-minded statements.

Meanwhile you can order the book here:


Meanwhile, you can find more of Ken Bok's wonderful stuff here: www.acimexplained.com and/or you can find his various video interviews on YouTube here http://www.youtube.com/acimexplained he is building up quite an awesome collection of materials on A Course in Miracles.

A Course in Miracles and Christianity: A Dialogue

This little book is practically a classic already: Course in Miracles and Christianity: A Dialogue


A Course in Miracles periodically gives rise to confusion if its use of language is mistaken for Christian. It is not, in the same way that Jesus was not a Christian in the narrow sense, because Christianity was not conceived by him or even during his lifetime, but is an interpretation of him by others who came after him.

A certain amount of confusion has occurred from time to time when statements from the Course get mixed in with Biblical quotes, without clarifying the different context. This books seeks to address this issue, and clear up the confusion by clarifying the profound differences between traditional Christianity and the teachings of the Course. What makes it so valuable, is that the format is one of a dialogue between friends, who obviously mutually respect each other, and undertook this conversation purely to be of service to others, since the evident potential for confusion helps nobody.

However, it would be a mistake to think this book is only for Christians trying to make up their mind about A Course in Miracles. The fact remains that throughout Western culture, we are imbued with the history of Christianity, and the image of Jesus and his death on the cross is ingrained, even if for some that very image, and the presence of suffering in the world, may be part of the reason they rejected the teachings, and became atheists, such as is the case in our day and age with Bart D. Ehrman. The concept of the creator force is the same if we call it God, or Nature, or Evolution. It is the concept where the cause of our life experiences is external to us, and life "happens" to us. Along with this world concept of individual existence and a separate reality, the belief in sacrifice is completely ingrained in the ego's belief system. It is the difference between regarding the universe and the world as an objective, tangible reality, or as "maya," or illusion, a dreamworld caused by the mind, in which we are hoist on our own petard as long as we take that first cause - what the Course calls the "tiny, mad idea" of separation - seriously, but which can also be undone, by learning not to take it seriously any longer, through forgiveness.

A perfect example of taking things seriously is Christianity in all its forms, starting with its redaction of the Bible, and bombarding it into a Holy Book, after selecting just those books that are supportive of the Christian dogma, and discarding, if not burning, the rest. For the purpose of the discussion in this book then, "the Bible" is seen as the instrument of that Christian dogma, and of mostly taking the stories of the Bible quite literally, and granting it a sometimes problematic coherence by regarding it as the Word of God. Outside of the Christian context the Bible could obviously be read in different ways, as is suggested numerous times in the Course itself, a possibility which is also cited in the introduction to this dialogue. Taken at its face value as Christianity does, the Bible is as solid as Newtonian physics, and unreservedly dualistic, granting the physical world reality by declaring that it was created by God. Everything more or less follows from that.

The dialogue in this book represents a very fair and balanced presentation of the differences between this traditional Christian view of the world, which so much permeates the Western world, and the very different view point of A Course in Miracles. The categories which are discussed are basic, and quite conclusive:

• The origin of the world: God created it (Christianity), vs. it's an illusion, a dreamworld projected on the basis of the tiny mad idea of the separation (Course).
• Jesus: Exclusive, and different from us as literally God's only son - the Christ (Christiantiy), or inclusive and same as us, but first to remember Who we really are in truth, and teaching us how we can learn the same thing, in awakening to the Christ Mind where the sonship remembers its oneness. (Course). 
• Crucifixion: Purposely suffered and died sacrificially in an act of vicarious salvation (Christianity), or did not perceive the attack because he knew he was not his body, and did not suffer, but taught only Love and forgiveness (Course);
• Resurrection: Bodily resurrection after the crucifixion (Christiantiy), and the resurrection came before the crucifixion in the form of awakening from the dream and remembering who he was, and doing so before us, so he can now help us, as our older brother and teacher to lead us home (Course). 
• Eucharist: The believers share in Jesus' vicarious sacrifice of his death on the cross, by symbolically partaking of the wine and wafer transmuted into his flesh and blood (Christian), or his followers share in his spirit, celebrating his presence to them in the mind as a demonstration that he did not die, but is alive in them (Course)
• Living in the world: This of course is where the rubber meets the road, and - (very) loosely paraphrasing the book here the alternatives look like:
• Christian style: Jesus, the Word become flesh, God's only son, who suffers and dies for our sins on the cross, and seven days later ascends and goes to Heaven, sitting at the right hand of the Father. He leaves us, the adopted children, with the promise that if we lead good and moral lives in this earth, and present our book with green stamps (good deeds), much like the S&H Green Stamps of old, at the gates, we may join him in Heaven after death, when the tally is made up for a game in which salvation can be won or lost based on making meaningful moral choices of free will. Thus our "stamps" are credits towards a hoped for future redemption. Temptation in this model is the doing of evil deeds on this moral field of experience;
• Course style: Jesus as the manifestation of the Holy Spirit, who went before us as our older brother, remembering the way home before we did, who awakened to his true Identity so that he did not suffer when the world crucified his body, but instead only forgave, demonstrating (teaching) only love, for that is what he is and what we are, and who constantly reminds us that in making the same choice with him, and joining with him in the atonement, we are making the choice of hell or heaven in real time.
  The HS Green Stamps (Holy Spirit Green Stamps) in this case are not meritorious deeds collected towards a future stay with Jesus in the balcony seats of Heaven, but rather miracles - a Holy Instant, a momentary view from the balcony seat with Jesus. While we are still too afraid to choose them permanently, the miracle is our experiential confirmation of what it feels like to choose Him as our teacher over the false authority usurped by our jailer, the ego. When at last we become clear that our only fight is with ourselves and not with an angry God who opposes us, and that we only put the jailer in business by continuing to vote him in office, then we are free to learn how every miracle lessens our allegiance until we finally change our vote and join with Jesus in the atonement. We learn to "teach only love" with him, as we accept his love for ourselves. On this path then, our deeds will become more and more loving as we progress in choosing only Jesus as our teacher and guide, but the choices between A, B, or C in the world are seen as only a distraction, and literally a temptation to solve on the physical level what can only be solved by changing our mind ("metanoia" was the N.T. Greek expression for that). Thus in this model the choices are between heaven and hell, freedom and imprisonment, and we experience it as the ability to shift our allegiance from the ego and its separation thoughts, to Jesus and the Holy Spirit, in a joining with Who and What we really are in truth - spirit, and an integral part of the Sonship.
  This life now is a growth path towards spiritual adulthood, by shifting from a teacher of scarcity, slavery and imprisonment, suffering and death (the ego), towards listening to the Voice for God, who is ever present to us within (the promise of the Eucharist), never mind how much we bury him under the worldly drama. He remains the ever present Alternative, the Other Choice. In this model the world simply loses its hold on us, as we choose for freedom. Thus Jesus' living presence to us in the now, is restored to us by our choices, until we fully realize we really are him, for the illusion of a separate free will was the cause of our suffering and pain, and giving that up is no sacrifice at all. Free will then is the freedom to choose the Love of God, in lieu of the incarceration of the ego.
• N.B. This paraphrasing was very liberal indeed - I made up the whole thing about the green stamps, but hopefully it serves as an illustration. I could also add that in the Christian tradition "taking up our cross,"  has been understood as following in Jesus'  footsteps as the suffering servant, in the mold of the passages in Isaiah which describe this. In the Course, "taking up our cross," would refer to taking responsibility for the fact that we chose the ego and crucifixion, simply because we cannot undo the choice until we first take responsibility for it, and recognize we made it in the first place. This willingness to see that we made the wrong choice and would now make another one is what the Course calls the " little willingness," which opens the gate for us to make another choice now.

In short, it becomes very clear in this book why mixing the two models arbitrarily really does not help anybody, because it muddies up either thought system. This little book is extremely helpful in clarifying the issues in a very elegant way. On another level it is a lesson in tolerance, where it simply becomes worthwhile to learn to understand another thought system and understand it for what it is, for that kind of freedom is loving and natural when we have no investment in the world. Whenever we can do these things in such an even handed manner, we will find ourselves where we are able to agree to disagree, and can simply be honestly curious about understanding another, and can enjoy better relations as a result. We learn to live with differences, not in the ego's way of conveniently ignoring inconvenient facts, which trip us up later, but because we have no investment in differences. Norris Clarke certainly represents Christianity in a very appealing way, and amazingly sometimes wanders very close to the Course in his appreciation, but eventually the unbridgeable differences remain.

One thing you will not find here is the perspective of the pre-Christian Jesus tradition, such as the Thomas Gospel, which in recent years has shown us that the traditional Christian point of view is not compatible with the teachings of Jesus either. When properly seen, the study of Thomas and some of the other pre-Christian literature, which was excluded from the Bible - although Thomas was quoted throughout - puts us on an entirely different track, where the Bible falls apart into a collection of books, that we can then appreciate more selectively as literature, and no longer as the monolithic Word of God. Along those lines we would end up placing a lot of "apocryphal" literature on a level with some of the books of the biblical canon, if not sometimes even give them preference as being more likely unadulterated, or closer to the source. In that respect it is worth noting that none of the "Christian" positions and theology as are investigated in this book and represented by Norris Clarke, can trace their origins to the pre-Pauline Jesus literature such as Thomas and Q.

Personally, I have essentially always been inclined to look at the Bible as simply a significant book, and with the respect that is due the holy book of any tradition, but with inconsistent qualities, and particularly have usually ignored Paul in my readings, but I hasten to add that I have also realized more profoundly as I work with the Course how that "Christian"/Newtonian - and would be "Biblical" - model of the world is ingrained in us as part of the ego thought system. So learning to tell the two apart in all their forms is helpful in learning to understand the Course, and learning what it teaches. I have thus come to regard Paul as the exemplar of the ego's strategy of bringing Jesus into the world, or, in the Course's language, bringing the solution to the problem, i.e. trying to fix the world, whereas the Course advocates bringing the problem to the solution, returning to the mind, where Jesus is present to us, and asking for his vision, in lieu of our own mistaken perceptions, as the only possible way out of problems that are of our own making - our own projections.

Again, looking at this purely from a personal standpoint, it boggles my mind when I read Norris Clarke's accounts of what Christians believe, and it really gets kind of funny for me. For most of my life I would have said that I believed in Jesus, but I wasn't a Christian. My understanding of him would have been closer to the symbolic view in ACIM:T-19.IV.C.10, where the birth of Jesus is equated to the beginning of an inner spiritual awakening. As a kid, I was brought up with the notion that the birth of Jesus was just symbolic of the inner events of spiritual awakening. And his baptism in the River Jordan under John the Baptist symbolic of spiritual awakening. By the same token however, until the Course came along in my life, I was never clear on the underlying content of the ego thought system, even though I looked on Christians as a primitive tribe, doomed to die out as they became more and more irrelevant - for in my native Holland people were leaving the churches in droves when I grew up, going from 90% church attendance at the time of my birth to under 10% by the time I emigrated to the USA some 29 years later.

Looking back today, I see how I had taken leave of Christianity, without much clarity about the thought system it stood for or my own subtle investment in it - although I never believed in his dying for our sins, and was taught early on to see that particular theological slight of hand as a sneaky attempt of the ego to have our cake and eat it too, or if you will, to get away with murder. But again, it was not until I met the Course that sorting out the ego thought system began in earnest, and this book is destined to be a classic which untangles the underlying concepts and prevents the confusion that results if people read no further than some superficial resemblances. From that standpoint it is equally helpful to a church pondering if it should include the Course in the liturgy - it should not - to a Course student who is befuddled by the sometimes Christian sounding language - no, this is not your grandfather's Jesus speaking. Regardless of what your faith may be, clarity can only be helpful, and attempts at being inclusive at the price of lost meaning help no one. You can only pour so much water in the wine and still call it wine. After all, " Jeder soll nach seiner fasson selig werden," as the Prussian King Frederick II put it (Everyone should become happy after their own fashion).

Sorting the Chaff from the Wheat

If there's anything Jed McKenna helps his readers do in The Enlightenment Trilogy, it is exactly that: Sorting the chaff from the wheat. In a world with shelves full of phony spirituality, which is often more useful as a drug to alleviate the pain of this life, or obfuscate it with rose-colored glasses, these books stand out as a hard-hitting alternative. There were always some "bonus materials" which were included in the e-book versions, but which have now been published in print as well, and this little volume is absolutely worth its weight in gold. To give a bit of the flavor, I'll quote some typical statements towards the end of the book:

... Most people get through the day by believing that if they don't break too many rules too much, they automatically get promoted up through the ranks; be it one life and straight to the top or a climb of many smaller steps. This comes to us from Maya's Ministry of Deferral & Procrastination, which promotes a doctrine of plausible denial and applied non-aggression, and where the motto is Rock the Cradle, Not the Boat. (p. 179)

My assistants and proofreaders warn me that people don't like to hear themselves portrayed so negatively. That surprises me. I would think that most folks, if they took a minute to sit down and really think about it, would blubber in joyous relief to find out that what they've been calling life was really just the most meager level of subsistence and that there were infinitudes more to this whole thing then they'd been led to believe. (p. 181)

Although my primary epiphany could be summed up as Truth Exists, it was actually much more complicated than that. The flip side of Truth Exists is This Ain't It. (p. 189)

These quotes are indicative for the quality of the book. It is truly hard-hitting from beginning to end. No sacred cows are spared, and he is consistently funny in the way he points up the fallacies, with which our ego, or "Maya" keep us wrapped around the axle, so we can't see for the life of us what's going on. Meanwhile he delivers among others a very clear expose of why it pays to get in the observer seat, and watch ourselves play the role which we think is our life, for it is the way to bring the ego's machinations to the light, and exposure is the only thing which will de-fang the ego in the long run. It cannot stand the light.

Besides other things, this book, and the entire series always seems helpful again in having a healthy respect for the ego, which can help us towards clarity as to why we do not want to hear the things that either Jesus, or the likes of Jed McKenna had to say, and why also Buddhism has nothing to do with who and what the Buddha was, and what he had to teach, just like Christianity has nothing to do with the teachings of Jesus. Simply put, we prefer to keep on dreaming. In the The Book of Thomas this theme is picked up among others in Logion 13, where Thomas after having spoken privately with Jesus, is asked by the other apostles what Jesus said, and he responds that they'd stone him if he told them. Accepting the atonement for ourselves, as the Course calls it, or reaching Human Adulthood, as McKenna calls it, is possible only if we are under no illusion as to why we resist it so much, and get very honest with ourselves and with that Internal Teacher, that quiet voice that will lead us to the truth if we let ourselves be led.

To conclude, I'll cite two priceless paragraphs on Buddhism, from page 47 of the book, noting that these comments apply to a lot more than just Buddhism:

Typical of their insistence on reconciling the irreconcilable is the Buddhist concept of Two Truths, a poignant two-word joke they don't seem to get, and yet this sort of perversely irrational thinking is near the very heart of the failed search for truth. We don't want truth, we want a particular truth; one that doesn't threaten the ego; one that doesn't exist. We insist on a truth that makes sense given what we know, not knowing that we know nothing.
Nothing about Buddhism is more revealing than the Four Noble Truths which, not being true are of dubious nobility. They form the basis of Buddhism, so it's clear from the outset that the Buddhists have whipped up a proprietary version of truth shaped more by market forces than any particular concern for the less consumer-friendly, albeit true, truth. (p. 47) 

I would hardly know what to add to that, so I won't try, except to say, run, don't walk to your nearest bookstore to get this little gem. Jed McKenna's Notebook: All Bonus Content from The Enlightenment Trilogy By Jed McKenna

Lemme 'splain

Today I was in a social situation, where my book came up, as part of introductions, and I got to practice (again) just how to explain simply where it fits. I had to be exact, for there was an evangelical theologian in the company. I'm finding that it is becoming easier and easier to do as I go along, and the notion is simple, Jesus was not a Christian, since that faith was invented after his time.

Jesus and the Buddha were spiritual teachers in their day and age, just like Krishnamurti was one in our day, and they were not founders of religions. Krishnamurti was very specific about that. Those religions were founded afterwards, by followers - Krishnamurti has been spared that fate sofar.

The fact that those followers did not necessarily teach the same thing as the people in whose name they built these religious systems has become blatantly clear from the Thomas gospel because it is the oldest of the Gospels, predating St. Paul by some 20 years, and it contains nothing at all of the theological ideas that made Christianity what it is. Moreover the dating of the Thomas gospel prior to the canonical Gospels, which reflect the editorial influence of Paul, is clear. Besides the absence of key (Christian) theological ideas, there is the fact that in the case of many sayings which later do appear in the Canonical Gospels, the form of those sayings is invariably more primitive in Thomas, leading to the inevitable conclusion that Thomas had to come first.

So the rest is a matter of personal preference. If Christianity works for you, fine. If you're interested in the teachings of Jesus in their own right, the Thomas gospel should be one of your primary sources, and you should clear your head of the cobwebs of Christianity. That's all there is to it. The biggest reason that people have had problems understanding the Thomas gospel, is because they cannot mentally sort out that the Jesus who speaks in Thomas is not a Christian. It is absolutely necessary that you're clear about that, otherwise you're bound to keep on misreading him.

The Santa Claus Syndrome

When I was very little, I (which is to say through my parents) knew this woman who I now feel channeled Jesus. Her name was Ms. Hofmans. She did not usually refer to him as Jesus, but referred to him generally as the Help, or God's Help. She always emphasized this faculty was always present to anyone who needed and wanted it, but she also always pointed out that Jesus was not like Santa Claus, and that the deal was to accept the Help on his terms, not on your terms. Her focus was always on praying with you more than for you, though she would frequently also channel messages, but the focus was clear, asking for Help meant letting go of your definition of the problem. In other words, let go of your preconceived notions of what the problem is and what the solution might be. This runs entirely counter to what the world wants.

This is also the psychological foundation of why Christianity reconstrued Jesus' teaching completely, and its theology creates an escape hatch from his urging to follow him to a Kingdom not of this world, and replaces it with a theology in which we get to have our cake and eat it too. We get to have our lives the way we think we want it, and he'll come back to save us later. Pfui. It was a close call, but at least we got away with it, or so it seems. So we leave him safely hanging on the wall, on his little wooden cross, and we don't have to bother with him much, but just go on and do our thing. He'll catch up with it later. Of course this kind of thinking also sets up a certain level of fear of him, that runs totally contrary to what he is and teaches, which is par for the course for separation in any form. We end up hating that from which we separate, but then feel subliminally threatened by it.

The Jesus we do want, is the Santa Claus version, which Ry Cooder sings about Jesus On The Mainline - "You can call him up and tell him what you want," "The line ain't never busy, you can call him up and tell him what you want." (What a gifted musician, by the way, and it is one of my favorite songs of his, look at the versions that are there on youtube!!!) We see that reenacted daily in various "predicitions"  of the second coming, or the coming of the Maitreya, etc. etc. etc. This is the vicarious savior, who dies for our sins, instead of us (which is what the word vicarious means - standing in for), who gives HIS life for OUR "sins," that type of a savior is par for the course for the ego, which wants to keep us firmly asleep, and not feeling responsible for the predicament we find ourselves in, instead of taking responsibility for our spiritual well-being. Or as I said before, we get to have our cake and eat it too, and Jesus comes back afterwards to fix the booboo, at least as story would have it.

The teachings of Jesus as we find them in the Thomas gospel, and in a more current form in A Course in Miracles, are more direct, and about taking responsibility for the way in which we see the world, and once we do that, Jesus can indeed help us to change our way of looking at the world and our experiences. That change of mind is his process of forgiveness, which is the way out of the hell hole. So the vicarious savior fits with a picture where we don't have to take responsibility for anything, and the world happens to us. Jesus the Inner Teacher, as he is expressed through the Thomas sayings and in A Course in Miracles, show us how to change our own role in the miserable experience we're having, by letting go of our judgment, and choosing his forgiveness instead. That is the way out of hell, it is empowering. This prayer goes a bit like this: "I've got it all wrong, I seem to be caught up in all of this mess, please help me see this differently." Again, therein lies the way out. Like any good therapist knows, no healing is possible unless the patient at least begins to acknowledge their responsibility for the predicament they are in. "And please tell me, who was it again who found nineteen abusive husbands/boyfriends in a row?"  Nothing changes until we deal with our role in the fiasco, and decide to change our mind about it. In the end it turns out to be a lot less painful if we stop banging our head against that concrete wall. Turns out Jesus is a pretty savvy therapist, then.

My recent explorations on this blog on the transformation from the direct teachings of Jesus to the later versions of him which became Christianity, and were adopted as the state religion of the Roman Empire, serve to put us in touch with how we all mangle his message, which turns out to be inconvenient, because we do prefer to be right, more so than happy.

Making a Christian out of Jesus: Stevan Davies

I would like to weave together some thoughts on the process that turned Jesus into a Christian, posthumously. I think it is always a good, refreshing conversation starter to make it clear that Jesus was not a Christian, as is now increasingly evident from what we are starting to understand of the Thomas gospel and its historical relationship to the other Gospels, as in, the fact that it was earlier, and that it lacks the explicit theological ideas,which defined Christianity. Ergo, those were added later, and were never part of Jesus' teachings. In and of itself there's nothing wrong with that, and if Christianity is working for you, that's fine--if it ain't broke don't fix it. But if you're at all like me and have an experience of cognitive dissonance with Christianity, understanding what Jesus said originally may be of some interest. I myself always was tuned in to wanting to understand the historical context, and hearing the teachings of Jesus without anyone else mixing in anything. Later I began increasingly to understand that the most critical thing is of Course my own inner understanding of him, and alongside that, my discernment of the historical picture deepened as well of course.

For me the whole thing started at a very young age, in a manner that I imagine was not dissimilar to the process that led Thomas Jefferson to his Jefferson Bible: just plain being bothered by the sense that there was too much redacting of the sayings of Jesus and too much editiorializing going on, and I always wanted to hear him without the clutter. What was the unadulterated voice like? I was made aware very early that particularly since the time of the enlightenment many serious theologians had begun asking such such questions (o.a. Radikalkritik). So many years later it became clear to me that the Thomas Gospel was the single clearest means history has now given us for cleaning up these misunderstandings. In the process of writing my book I became aware of lots of materials that is available today, some of which might have pulled the book into another direction entirely, and lose focus. So there are always things you can't cover. The purpose of this site however is definitely (among other things), to provide a home for some explorations which might have been too detailed for the book.

One fascinating piece of research in this category was by Prof. Stevan Davies, and his main site on the Thomas gospel is available through the link of his name here, and the piece that caught my attention was an extensive analysis of his of how, in the transition from Thomas to Mark, the sayings were combined, and given a context, which set up the whole process of viewing Jesus a certain very specific way, namely the Christian way, as it was then beginning to emerge. The greatest influence in which was the theological influence of Paul. I want to discuss some of his findings here, not from a formal scholarly standpoint, for that I'll refer you to his original article, but from the point of view of the content, as we might understand it today based on A Course in Miracles. I will provide the links to the material, will avoid the detailed discussion, which invariably will boil down to the difference between choosing the ego or the Holy Spirit, since that is the only meaningful choice ever. I will simply expand on his comments with an eye to how you might look at the material from a Course standpoint.

In general terms then, it may pay to recap here something about the issue of level confusion as the Course sees it, which is really the psychological mechanism which the mind uses to defend against the teachings of Jesus, while conversesly the miracle is Jesus's way to undo the level confusion. And, as the Course makes abudantly clear, coming and going we have the need to defend ourselves againt his teachings of a Kingdom not of this world, since we prefer our own little kingdom which is very much of this world, for the very good reason that here we get to be the boss. So level confusion is in effect the ego's way of reinterpreting Jesus's sayings on the level where it operates, the body and the world, and as a result it now gets to tell Jesus what it is he means, rather than the other way around. It's a simple case of the ego telling him to play by its rules, or not at all, for the simple reason that it's the ego's ball.

After we kill him, we feel guilty, but then we turn around and we then sugar coat it by making an idol out of him, and creating a religion in his name, which acts essentially as a justification of the ego. The way the truth is preserved in spite of all the world's violence directed at him is exactly because he does not defend himself, since he knows that he is not his body. Here is one of the key passages from the Course:

    Since you cannot not teach, your salvation lies in teaching the exact opposite of everything the ego believes. This is how you will learn the truth that will set you free, and will keep you free as others learn it of you. The only way to have peace is to teach peace. By teaching peace you must learn it yourself, because you cannot teach what you still dissociate. Only thus can you win back the knowledge that you threw away. An idea that you share you must have. It awakens in your mind through the conviction of teaching it. Everything you teach you are learning. Teach only love, and learn that love is yours and you are love. (ACIM:T-6.III.4)

Since our behavior reflects what we believe, we are always "teaching," i.e. expressing a belief system. Any one with parenting experience gets to find out how children respond to what you do, not to what you say they should do, although they can get pretty confused in the process, if as parents we are of a split mind, and take our confusion out on the kids. And it's not only the kids who get confused, we're confusing ourselves as well, and often times don't realize that the kids merely reflect our own confusion back to us. He is even more pointed in an earlier paragraph, dealing specifically with the crucifixion, in effect correcting our level confusion:

    That is why you must teach only one lesson. If you are to be conflict-free yourself, you must learn only from the Holy Spirit and teach only by Him. You are only love, but when you deny this, you make what you are something you must learn to remember. I said before that the message of the crucifixion was, "Teach only love, for that is what you are." This is the one lesson that is perfectly unified, because it is the only lesson that is one. Only by teaching it can you learn it. "As you teach so will you learn." If that is true, and it is true indeed, do not forget that what you teach is teaching you. And what you project or extend you believe. (ACIM:T-6.III.2)

In other words the only way to be consistent is to choose for oneness, is to choose for Love, since if there's oneness, there cannot be conflict, so teaching anything else creates conflict. The simple fact that remains is that truth is true, and everything else is a lie. Thus the way Jesus teaches--he did then, and he does now--is that it's all on the mind level, he asks us to follow him to his Kingdom which is not of this earth. Or to paraphrase that, here in this world, everything is dualistic, and therefore conflict ridden, for the world arises from a thought of conflict, which is the thought that I could be separate from God. So as long as we take the world and the body as our point of departure in our life, and our thinking, we have conflict built in, and the consequence are in accord with that. If we follow Jesus, we take spirit as our point of departure, on which level their cannot be conflict, since everything is one. This is why the Course constantly urges us that the answer is not in dragging Jesus into our messes, and making them good and real, but rather that we should take the illusion to the truth, and turn to Jesus or the Holy Spirit for help, which entails returning to the mind, and joining the solution instead of making the problem real and thus preventing the solution.

The Atonement does not make holy. You were created holy. It merely brings unholiness to holiness; or what you made to what you are. Bringing illusion to truth, or the ego to God, is the Holy Spirit's only function. Keep not your making from your Father, for hiding it has cost you knowledge of Him and of yourself. The knowledge is safe, but where is your safety apart from it? The making of time to take the place of timelessness lay in the decision to be not as you are. Thus truth was made past, and the present was dedicated to illusion. And the past, too, was changed and interposed between what always was and now. The past that you remember never was, and represents only the denial of what always was. (ACIM:T-14.IX.1)

So, as with Jesus before Pontius Pilate, to the world it's the other way around, as is explained here:

Much of the ego's strange behavior is directly attributable to its definition of guilt. To the ego, the guiltless are guilty. Those who do not attack are its "enemies" because, by not valuing its interpretation of salvation, they are in an excellent position to let it go. They have approached the darkest and deepest cornerstone in the ego's foundation, and while the ego can withstand your raising all else to question, it guards this one secret with its life, for its existence depends on keeping this secret. So it is this secret that we must look upon, for the ego cannot protect you against truth, and in its presence the ego is dispelled. (ACIM:T-13.II.4)

So this is the point also why Jesus's message is never lost, never mind how badly we mangle it. It also explains why across the ages people have found their way to him at all times, in spite of religious beliefs that sometimes seem to make hit harder, for his message never dies. That is its exact point, that is the resurrection. He taught to the seeming end that he was in the world but not of it, that he was spirit, not his body, and the final expression of that was to experience the crucifixion of his body, knowing full well that he was not his body. Thus the inner peace he demonstrated is the appeal to the heart, to value only truth, and no words, no theology can undo that message, since it is beyond words. It is the living reminder that his reality of Love (the Kingdom), is ultimately preferable to the substitute reality of the ego, in which we stubbornly believe we are the role we play, even after the play is over. The choice in the end is simply between disssociating the role, and remembering who we are in truth, as spirit, or justifying the role as our only reality and thus continuing the murder of Christ, or the crucifixion, as the Course usually refers to it.

What Christianity did with the teachings was to pull them down into this world, even while Jesus as appealing to our better knowledge, such as in Matthew, when he is quoted as saying: "How is it you don't understand that I was not talking to you about bread?" In short he is teaching in parables on what is going on in the mind, and so leading us back to the abstract reality of spirit, while we insist on dragging him down to our problems in the world, be they about bread, or finding a parkin spot.

Love Does Not Condemn

This is the book. The subtitle spells it out. In a way, if Ken Wapnick has a magnum opus, this is it. It is not for the faint of heart, but others will inhale this material, for it puts our entire Western spiritual/religious framework into a completely new perspective.

More than many other authors, Ken has the profound erudition in the Western intellectual tradition to understand the full scope of the intellectual context of the Course. For some, this may appear to be of passing interest only, but for many others this is very relevant indeed as our study of the Course deepens. Seen at an abstract level, the Course appears to be Advaita Vedanta for the West and with one very important twist, namely that the manifest world is not lent credence at all, as it does in Advaita by seeing it as a Divine play, but rather as a manifestation, a projection in physical form, of the "tiny mad idea" of the separation only. In other words, the world is only what the perceiver, who conceives of himself as separate from the all, perceives, and is a reflection of the erroneous thought process, that takes physical form only because of the separation thought itself, and has no external cause. This turns out to be crucial, as in a way this leaves even Advaita Vedanta with a compromise to dualistic thinking, granting some limited objectivity to the world of form - i.e. the world, although being seen as an illusion, and a silly play, is not our illusion, but is conceived in the mind of the godhead, etc. therefore my changing my mind is not enough. The Course is completely radical in seeing that the only source of the world is illusory itself, being only the tiny misthought, which it refers to as "the tiny mad idea," as if anything at all could be separate from God. And so our only problem is the healing of our own misperception, and what is needed is our willingness to find "another way" of looking at this world. And thus for A Course in Miracles, it's all in the mind, and therein lies the rub. With this little introduction, I want to simply highlight some of the exciting historical explorations in this book.

The terms for the subtitle were taken from a seventeenth century version of the Book of Common Prayer, which says the following: "From fornication, and all other deadly sin; and from all the deceits of the world, the flesh, and the devil, Good Lord, deliver us." And anybody who has been around the Jewish or Christian faiths, and their institutionalization of guilt, will immediately appreciate how central these concepts are. At least in the tradition of A Course in Miracles, it is clear how we are to be delivered of these evils, namely by relinquishing our investment in their reality, for as with all demons, they are brought to life and kept alive only by our faith in them, while Jesus teaches only forgiveness of our sins. The explorations of this book really deepen the message of the Course, by demonstrating how Jesus in its pages not only offers correction of certain Biblical passages and concepts, or our interpretation thereof, but how at a much deeper level, it deals with a number of themes peculiar to Western spirituality and religion, and resolves many issues where Western thought has been stuck at various times. And it is important to remember that very much in line with the thinking C.G. Jung expressed on this point, that if we were born in the West, it would probably be helpful to resolve our issues in the context of Western traditions, since we can only resolve the issues on the level where they occur. Jung meant his comments as a counterweight to the fashionable flight to Eastern spiritualities. The title of this book sets the tone immediately in line with the thought system of ACIM, in that it is a teaching of love, and non-judgment, non-condemnation, or, to put it positively, forgiveness. The dedication of the book is worth quoting as well:

To all "Gnostics"--past, present, and to come--who seek to know God through understanding this world's purpose, striving to realize, in the words of the oft-qouted Valentinian formula, that "what liberates is the knowledge of who we were, what we became; where we were, whereinto we have been thrown; whereto we speed, wherefrom we are redeemed; what birth is and what rebirth" (Excerpta ex Theodoto)

Thus in the typical quaint language of that time this highlights a path of inner inquiry, in a spirit we also find in ACIM, expressed in the second century gnostic teacher Valentinus, whose teachings are known to us only in fairly fragmentary form, but bear close resemblance to the Course in some respects. Ken then balances this statements, which a quote from the Course, which explains the title of the book:

The body was not made by love. Yet love does not condemn it and can use it lovingly, respecting what the son of God has made and using it to save him from illusions.
(A Course in Miracles)

For the rest, while there is no way to truly do this book justice in any reasonable length post, I'll offer an overview of its content with a few hopefully helpful comments. Part I, The Introduction covers the necessary background in Gnosticism, the Platonic traditions, the Early Church, and the gradual development of the antagonism between the church and the gnostics in the second century CE. All of these things are really covered in amazing detail, and their chief importance is again to gain an appreciation of how deeply many of the themes of the Course are a precise counter point to patterns woven into the fabric of the Western tradition, and how the Course properly understood proposes a very sophisticated resolution of many long standing philosophic/religious questions, frequently breaking through all categories. Also interesting is the realization how much e.g. the second century Gnostic teacher Valentinus really prefigured the Course, among other things in the myth stemming from his school saying that Jesus was off on the side laughing under a tree during the crucifixion--emphasizing again the resurrection as a spiritual event, not to mention as something that preceded the crucifixion, as many Gnostics in fact believed. Thus Jesus would have known at the time of the Crucifixion that he was not his body, and that even this violence could not affect who he truly was. Therefore he would not have been the vicarous sacrificial offering to a cruel God the father, but rather a wisdom teacher, demonstrating what he taught by living it, namely that that he was not his body, but spirit. What is clear by the end of this introductory section is that by the end of the 2nd century the free intermingling of "gnostic" ideas within the general budding Christian tradition is ending, with a polarization of the Gnostics, emphasizing inner experience of truth, as the more unruly crowd, who begin to be expelled more and more from the now forming orthodoxy, with the Church emerging as the winner, by every available means including book destruction, etc. In this context the Gnostics became mostly convenient scapegoats, against which the Church could define the right belief (ortho-doxy).

In Section IIa, the book develops the versions of the "creation myth" in Platonism, Christianity, and Gnosticism, showing strands both dualistic and non-dualistic thinking, demonstrating in depth how the more inward focused worlds of Gnostic and Platonic thought intermingled with emerging Christian thought. It is in the 9th chapter, about Jesus, that some of the formational themes in the development of early Christianity get an airing, in particular the principal difference between the Gnostic schools seeing the resurrection as an inner development, and something that preceded the crucifixion, versus the then emerging proto-Christian orthodoxy, which with Paul thinks of the resurrection mostly as a bodily event, which happens only after the crucifixion. It is very helpful for us to understand that these different positions were being widely debated in these early years. Another very important discussion is the one about Docetism, dealing with the question to what extent Jesus was or was not his body, or he only appeared in a body, which includes discussions of such gems as the Acts  of John, where the apostles discuss the differences in their respective experiences of Jesus. Again, exploring all of these precedents would give us a deeper appreciation that the later positions of the Course have deep roots in a long tradition, and address issues that people have struggled with for the last 2000 years, even though for long periods of time certain "orthodox" notions appeared to limit the questioning and the debate. As we can understand with the benefit of hindsight, such periods of quiet meant not that all questions had been answered, just more or less effectively suppressed.

This section concludes with a chapter on "Practical Implications," showing how all these different strains of thinking under the broader umbrella of Christian thought, resulted in widely differing lifestyles, again modeling all of the differing attitudes which we may recognize in students of ACIM to different degrees, if they run off half-cocked with a partial understanding of the Course. To start, it is noteworthy how little currency some dominant points of Christian practice seem to get in Gnostic circles, or at least how different they are in their interpretation, this applies to baptism, anointing. The eucharist barely makes a showing. The theme of The Bridal Chamber as an expression of spiritual "marriage" shows up, which prefigures the notion which in the Course gets the name of the Holy Relationship. This part of the discussion is therefore really about religious rites and symbols, then follows a discussion of moral concepts and behaviors, all resulting from different ways of looking at the world and our position in it, and varying from deliberate libertinism to ascetism to moderation, and some of these are truly interesting, such as the Gnostic libertines who essentially reasoned that since the world was not real, it was their sacred duty to break all the moral norms and act out. Ascetism then is the opposite mistake, instead of acting out because the world is unreal, it reflects a resolve of fighting the world and its hold over us, which of course likewise makes the problem real. Finally there is also a tradition of moderation. Next, in a further exploration of Platonism, Plotinus is perhaps the most interesting, for he focuses on a contemplative life, not on doing good deeds so much as through contemplation to arrive at a position where one cannot help but do good deeds.

The last third of the book addresses the position of A Course in Miracles, providing in fact an integration of all of the strands that were left dangling in these various traditions into a very different and amazingly coherent viewpoint, making the Course an intricate cauda to Western philosophical and spiritual tradition. As addressed at the outset, for the Course it is essential to understand that it's all in the mind, and that the world merely is the stage of our physical experience, but only a projection from the mind, not an objective reality. Thus the idea of separation happens in the mind, and this also makes salvation even possible, for if we made a mistake, and the implication is we can correct it, and the Course's position is that we overcome our futility by realizing we did not commit a sin which is incapable of change, but made a mistake which can be fixed. And the fundamental nature of fixing it is in taking responsibility for having made it, even if we seem clueless about the hows and whys and wherefores. The method of the Course is to experientially put us in touch with the minds ability to change--change our mind, or metanoia in NT Greek--so that it teaches us not mere theory, but a path of experience which helps us reintegrate our real self, instead of the proverbial idol worship which is essentially the world of the ego. For the ego always chases something that is not me, some idol outside of me, and that keeps me completely engaged in the world, oblivious to the fact that I have a mind which is capable of change. The Course says about this: "The secret of salvation is but this, that I am doing this unto myself." (ACIM:T-27.VIII.10:1)

In the Epilogue the book finally summarizes the Course's integration of all these strands of Western spiritual tradition as follows:

A Course in Miracles is such a rewrite of Christian theology (as suggested in a preceding quote from Helmut Koester, reflecting on the impact of Nag Hammadi), in the context of the Neoplatonic and Gnostic traditions, cleansed and expanded by the insights of twentieth century psychology. Thus the old wine of traditional Christianity has been reconstituted in new wineskins, its "old schemes" looked at freshly, and presented anew to eyes and ears receptive to the form of its message. Indeed, the Course can be thought of as the zenith of Western philosophical and religious thought, reconciling the paradox that has virtually imprisoned us in thought systems that reflected our conflicted experience in a world from which we could not truly escape. Holding the key that unlocks this prison door, the Course heals these conflicts of the past, freeing us to build upon its foundation a new beginning, turning the corner on a journey that will carry us ever closer to our God.

That paragraph alone would make it all worthwhile. And while some will not have the patience for this voluminous material, it is important to realize that indeed all these "strands" as I called them before, are somehow present in our spiritual DNA, and that indeed A Course in Miracles is an integration of it all, regardless of whether we are conscious of it or not. The Course certainly is intellectually very profound, but it does not demand that we become scholars of comparative religion, philosophy, psychology, let alone all three. The present book is a tour de force that manages to do all this, and for those of us who are so inclined, it offers endless exciting vistas into the deep structure of the Course's thought system and its roots in Western thought. We end up with a paranoramic, or maybe I should say symphonic, view of Western tradition, in which the Course now forms the cauda which picks up all of the loose ends, and brings it to a rousing conclusion. And finally of course it all ends in a whimper, when we do accept the atonement for ourselves, and realize that all of this was "much ado about nothing." Gratitude to Ken Wapnick as its author, and the pre-eminent teacher of the Course is certainly in order.

Closing the Circle, Squared

At least. And there may be more than two... circles that are being closed, I mean.

When picking a name for this book, I quickly noticed that the name that suggested itself to me was not all that original, and that the subtitle would have to clarify exactly what circles were being closed here. Nevertheless the name seemed appropriate, and the publisher agreed, so closing the circle it was.

The main circle that was being closed, and the overt point of the book, was for me the living connection between the Jesus of the Thomas gospel and the protagonist of A Course In Miracles.

Another circle that is being closed by means of this book, starts with my connection with the work of Johan Willem Kaiser, whose work early in life set me on a track of understanding that the issue was not a moral conversion as in the Pauline traditions of Christianity, but the actual following of Jesus as a living reality, i.e. experience. Therefore the issue was not theology to clarify in terms the world can accept what the meaning of Jesus might be, which after all boils down to us telling Jesus what it is he said, but rather, it was to make oneself available to learning what Jesus might have to tell us, which means to accept him as a teacher, and shut up ourselves, until we begin to hear what he has to say. In the end, this historical issue turns out to be merely a special case of the ego's resistance to salvation, and it has nothing to do with the fact that Paul from time to time also wrote some brilliant, as well as beautiful things that seem undoubtedly inspired and inspiring.

The choice however is between the crucified Jesus of Christianity, and the resurrected Jesus of the living spiritual tradition of which for me personally J.W. Kaiser was an exponent and A Course In Miracles is another, for either, the point would be to help us live in a living relationship with Jesus, which they might help facilitate, but hardly define or limit. Not for nothing does the Course say of itself (ACIM:W-189.7:5), "Forget this world, forget this course, and come with wholly empty hands unto your God." In short it wants to be a conduit to the living experience, and with that its function is over. Kaiser takes a similar position when he says in the dedication of one of his books: "If it [the book] could here or there accompany a lonely Traveler through the desert in his hour of difficulty, then this work of one who had to bend over backwards towards the light, has already fulfilled its function." (In  "De mysteriën van Jezus in ons leven," not yet available in English). In other words again, he can only point us in a direction, and the last thing he would want is for his words to become important and be given meaning in lieu of experience, as opposed to leading us to experience.

To intellectualize spirituality is to pretend spirituality with the ego as our guide, and it is another last-ditch attempt by the ego to prevent us from leading a spiritual life in practice, which is all Jesus ever meant with "following him," i.e. take the risk of living in his spirit in our own lives. Paul is perhaps the prototype of this symptomology, but we see it every day, everywhere, and if we dedicate ourselves to spirituality in our own lives we will see how we ourselves are tempted to remain stuck in such intellectualizations, which prevent us from actually living the reality of spirit, and keep us sound asleep in the dream. The ego values intellectual accomplishments very highly, and the world likewise rewards the study of itself, including its spiritual dimensions, for confining it to an intellectual understanding, as opposed to a living realization, means that it has been reduced to a theory of life, instead of a life. To spirit therefore this is all dead matter, but it sells well, so you can make a career out of it. The effect however is to put the ego in charge of our spiritual development, which may produce an effective stage prop, never any spiritual accomplishment. This is why the Course is so clear that the choice is completely either/or, the Holy Spirit(Jesus), or the ego. There is no other choice to be made.

J. W. Kaiser made me very aware early on about the unbridgeable gap between the teachings of Jesus and the teachings of Paul (ostensibly about Jesus), the latter of which became Christianity. He was also familiar with much of the debate about Jesus and Paul that had raged in theological circles in the 19th century (Radikalkritik, et. al.), about which he observes that Paul always won out in those circles. He furthermore was very clear that the relationship with Jesus was about inner experience (change of mind), while Paul shifted the action towards morality, confession, and conversion (repentance). Thus Paul represents a typical example of skipping steps in our spiritual development, and underestimating the radical nature of the fundamental change of mind Jesus is talking about. In this way intellectual accomplishment, theology is the meat and substance of this stage prop ("All the world's a stage," after all), and repentance, and contrition in our condition as miserable sinners, ensure that we safely exclude ourselves from the possibility of spiritual achievement.

In Kaiser's time the Gospel of Thomas was just being discovered--the first translations appeared in the 1950s, and he died in 1960--but for the time being its historical significance was not well understood, particularly not that--as is now fairly generally understood--the fact that it must be dated before Paul, which nicely explains why none of the elements of Christian theology even make an appearance in the sayings of Jesus which are in this Gospel. For me, this is definitely the closing of another circle, meaning that it substantially solidifies the record of the pre-Pauline Jesus of Thomas, free of Christian theology, as the teacher I was looking for all along, and who I have found speaking to me in a very authentic way, albeit in a very modern form in the pages of A Course In Miracles. Kaiser in his day suggested in one of his books that the time might come that psychology might enable a movement to abandoning Paul, and returning to the teachings of Jesus. Little did he know that within ten years after his death Dr. Helen Schucman, a psychologist, was to have this channeling experience, the fruits of which we now know as A Course In Miracles. Therefore the early dating of the Thomas Gospel is compelling not only as a matter of literary form, in that sayings Gospels predated narrative Gospels, but it is also compelling because Jesus speaks only directly of spiritual experience in the form of quotations that express his teachings in the parabolic koan style, with which we have now begun to become somewhat familiar, and which are clearly geared to living experience and not to theological ruminations. This is evidently the reason why this little book has caused some mild indigestion at times in Christian circles. It would seem better to deal with it forthright. The fact that the Pauline tradition became historically dominant is hardly proof of its authenticity. The two are simply different and hence totally incompatible.

We might see this in yet a different light by observing that the theological development always follows, and never precedes the spiritual development, and that alone should make us sceptical of the value of intellectualizations as a facilitator of spiritual experience. Within the context of the Course, it is very clear that intellectualizing the work can short-circuit the experience, and thus delays us on the trip. Understanding is helpful only to the extent that it leads to experience, but it becomes harmful if it prevents the experience, and in the Course context this problem is known as skipping steps, i.e. where we act as if we are further along in the process than we are, and thus prevent ourselves from having the experiences we need, and which our ego is always desperate to prevent us from having, such as to "question every value that we hold," which the Course posits as absolutely crucial to our process (c.f. ACIM:T-24.In.2:1). Skipping steps is a nifty way of safeguarding some of our dearest sacred cows and assumptions, meanwhile pretending to accomplishment we don't have. It is at that juncture that often times cults and religions are formed, which pretend to be something different, but always end up being yet another rehash of the ego's thought system, which we do not want to let go in the worst way. A Course In Miracles at least helps us understand the basis of our resistance.

In conclusion, I feel that this second circle that this book closes has to do with Kaiser's comment about why in theological circles Paul always ends up being reasserted, he has to be, because of the inner consistency of the theology of Christianity, which started with Paul, not Jesus. Hence it should surprise no-one that among Paul's disciples, Paul's intellectualizations of the meaning of Jesus will always take precedence over the actual teachings of Jesus themselves. It is merely a cultural stereotype that substitutes intellectualization for living experience.

Entering the Mainstream...

The other day I picked up at a news stand copy of a "Collectors Edition" of US News & World Report, titled "The Secrets of Christianity." I was amazed, for finally some relatively serious information is entering the mainstream, in a format that is easily accessible, and relatively informative. It seems to be a good omen ahead of the publication of my book. After all if US News and World Report is not mainstream, nothing is.

Several years ago, when Tim Freke and Peter Gandy just had their first books out in which they pursued in their way the notion that the earthly life of Jesus is not the point but the spiritual symbolism is -remember the Course calls him a manifestation of the Holy Spirit- I had a correspondence with one of them, I believe it was Peter, and they seemed to be unacquainted with what I assumed to be their precursor literature from the school of Radikalkritik and their predecessors in turn reaching back all the way to the 18th century in France and England. Today their books are featured on websites on Radikalkritik. At its hight, Radikalkritik (the major website is www.hermann-detering.de which has multilingual information in German, Dutch and English) flourished mainly in the 2nd half of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th in Germany and Holland. The twin pillars of inquiry were the lack of historical detail about Jesus, and the mythological character of the literature, and the exploration of the disconnect between Jesus and Paul, including the fact that some researchers entirely dismissed the letters of Paul as the product of Christian self-justification in the 2nd century, attributed to Paul, but historically dubious. Somewhat to my surprised, Radikalkritik is now discussed in the opening article of this publication, and at some length.

In other words, the fissure between Jesus and Christianity is now entering mainstream awareness, and this ties in very nicely with the growing interest in apocryphal literature, and exploration of the possible meaning of Jesus beyond the boundaries of the Christian churches. So it would seem that after the youthful silliness of The DaVinci Code, which sort of exploded the latent interest in these issues from a rebellious standpoint that daddy lied to us (or in this case the Pope lied to us), without and real historical credibility to its arguments, we are as a society now entering a phase of broader inquiry into the real issues. This connects quite well with the Jesus of the Thomas Gospel and the Course, both of which clearly do not sound like the Jesus of Christian orthodoxy at all. The Course clarifies those differences mostly in the first 6 Chapters of the book, but occasionally reverts to it later, since it clearly deliberately uses the terminology to evoke for the reader an experience of cognitive dissonance, which rousts us out of our traditional understanding of Jesus, as not a figure of history, but as an inner presence which can lead us back home, out of the ego's insanity.

I feel that it is very helpful to realize that amidst the broad appearance that Christianity continued unabatedly to maintain the Pauline dogma through the ages, that in fact there have been very substantive groups of thinkers, who smelled a rat, and who perceived a dissonance between Paul and Jesus. For myself this whole picture did not come together completely until the Course, but being aware of it since growing up, the Course simply clinched it, and once we begin to understand the Thomas Gospel for what it is, it all becomes even clearer why the Jesus who speaks to us from its pages is not a proto-Christian at all.

The Meaning of the Thomas Gospel

It pays to dig deeper. It always does. My own experiences with the Thomas gospel started innocently enough. My mindset from very early on was one of feeling that Jesus was a teacher who I wanted to find, but somehow he seemed buried under the archaeological rubble of stories, theories, theology and dogma about him, which had pretty much obliterated anything he might have ever said. I was pretty much raised in the notion that the churches were not the place to start looking. As a young man, and literate in Greek, I began to focus on the fact that Jesus had spoken Aramaic, and began to study the Aramaicisms in NT Greek, guided by the likes of Gustaf Dalman and Matthew Black, which led nowhere fast, other than some interesting dabbling in Aramaic, but never any meaningful mastery, for by that time I began to see how ludicrous the attempt was. Surely if Jesus really was who I thought he was, he was not dependent on my learning Aramaic, just because that was his language 2,000 years ago. In retrospect I recognize that experience as clear guidance, and that he was saying to me that he was perfectly capable of speaking my language, so there was no use in taking the long way around. So I decided the exercise was silly, and not worth pursuing further.

Thomas popped up in my teens because my parents went to a lecture by Prof. Gilles Quispel, and excitement was in the air over hearing something perhaps more original than the gospels we had. Somehow it was to be still a few decades before Thomas was to start getting the attention it deserved, because of the increasing recognition that it did in fact predate the Canonical Gospels and more importantly the Inventor of Christianity, aka. Paul of Tarsus. But the Thomas Gospel is a symbol, and its history is itself a parable, of how we buried (but literally!) the clearest record of the teachings of Jesus, which have an immediacy, that still speaks to us today, with more force of directness than almost any of the stories about him.

When in the 3rd Logion he tells us in colorful imagery not to listen to the teachers that tell you the Kingdom is elsewhere, then this is quite in the same vein as the Course's notion of a "Journey without distance to a goal that has never changed," (ACIM:T-8.VI.9:7) and the Jesus speaking to us wants to be invited into our life here and now--whenever here and now is, for we are always in the moment, unless we take another ego detour which merely validates the time-space framework of the world. The whole ego-ploy that made him into a religion, not to mention an important historical figure, in fact separates him from us and us from him, and puts him on a pedestal. "Some bitter idols have been made of him who would be only brother to the world,"  the Course says (ACIM:C-5.5). This presence and immediacy which is asking for our attention, places us in the borderland between learning and knowing, which is described in the Course as follows: "There is nothing about me that you cannot attain. I have nothing that does not come from God. The difference between us now is that I have nothing else. This leaves me in a state which is only potential in you."

So having the Kingdom is entirely possible to us, but we're our own worst enemies as long as we hold on to "something else," and the forgiveness process of the Course, as much as the core of any other spiritual path must be the gradual realization that the ego's "something else," is nothing, and giving it up is no sacrifice, once we start wondering why we are holding on for dear life to smeothing so totally valueless. A key passage in the Course describes it thus:

No one who comes here but must still have hope, some lingering illusion, or some dream that there is something outside of himself that will bring happiness and peace to him. 2 If everything is in him this cannot be so. 3 And therefore by his coming, he denies the truth about himself, and seeks for something more than everything, as if a part of it were separated off and found where all the rest of it is not. 4 This is the purpose he bestows upon the body; that it seek for what he lacks, and give him what would make himself complete. 5 And thus he wanders aimlessly about, in search of something that he cannot find, believing that he is what he is not. (ACIM:T-29.VII.2)

And again, to come back to Thomas, this Jesus who is here with us, now, in the moment if we let the book speak to us, tells us in Logion 42 to "Be passersby,"  to climb in the observer's seat (with Jesus naturally), for looking at the ego with him is the process which will undo the ego's spell. The ego not only sells us the Brooklyn Bridge, but the whole universe, all of time and space, and for the longest time we all think it is quite something, much like Plato's prisoners believe they are seeing reality on the wall in their cave. Yet the way out is right here, in front of our face, if we honestly look with the forgiveness of Jesus (doing it alone we may feel stupid having bought the damn bridge, let alone the rest of it), for only with his love beside us can we gently let it go. So our shortest way home always starts right here, if we choose to rely on this Internal Teacher who is as our Elder Brother, offering us his guiding hand to help us find the way home, for in Logion 5 he is quoted as saying:

Know what is in front of your face, and what is hidden from you will be disclosed to you. There is nothing hidden that will not be revealed.

(Pursah's Gospel of Thomas, in Your Immortal Reality, P. 163)

The resurrection is ours if we will only open the book, and sit with it, and realize he's talking to us, and he'll walk right off the page, if we'd just let him in.

Elaine Pagels: Re-discovering Thomas

Active interest in the Thomas Gospel dates from the 1890's, pursuant to the discovery of the first Greek fragments of it in the Oxyrrhynchus papyri, and started to seep into popular culture ever since translations of fragments became part of major collections of apocryphal NT literature in the early 20th century. In protestant Northern Europe these found mass circulation in the early 20th cetury, apparently less so in English speaking markets, though it was available around the same time. After the discoveries at Nag Hammadi this interest went into overdrive. Translations of the Coptic Thomas Gospel started appearing in the late 50's, and seem to have grown to a steady stream.
I experienced some of the early excitement as a child, when my parents attended a presentation from Prof. Gilles Quispel in the 1960's - finally Jesus in his own words! and no longer through the filter of Paul and the church... Somehow it seems that with Elaine Pagels' book, Beyond Belief the afterburners kicked in at least in the Anglo-Saxon market, and the Thomas Gospel truly began to enter the mainstream. Why was it that, when Elaine Pagels published this book it seemed as if, at least in the English speaking markets, interest in the Gospel of Thomas suddenly took flight? I don't know. Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code as well as Gary Renard's The Disappearance of the Universe, both of which were published at the same time, seemed likewise to take completely unexpected flight, playing in part into the same material in different ways. So the time was right for Thomas, and these three authors caught the wave.

Pagels writes from the vantage point of a "recovering" Christian - the opening line of her book is about her visit to the (Episcopalian) Church of the Heavenly Rest in Manhattan - and that approach brings with it some limitations in appreciating Thomas, but also some unique qualifications to open the field, since this is where most of her readership starts from. As a first exploration of Thomas this book has a lot to recommend it for many readers who are curious, the last word it is not. Dan Brown's book does its job with chutzpah and the flights of fancy of a suspense thriller even if sometimes with a regrettable pretense of historicity bordering on a hoax, which plays into a juvenile sentiment that the church is holding out on us (which is historically accurate in a deeper sense of course). Gary Renard's work brings up the rear with what may arguably be the most logical and appealing presentation, though for a general reader some of his story may seem utterly fantastic at first, except that the result is easily the most logical, coherent and consistent approach to the phenomenon of Thomas. Old Occam would be pleased. But back to Pagels for now.

Pagels starts out with sharing a personal existential crisis, the death of her young son (age six), and how she found herself going back to church during some years of struggling with his health crisis ever since he was born. This experience brings back into awareness what she likes about the church (community), and what she dislikes about it (dogma, and exclusivity). She uses these personal ruminations to introduce us to the Thomas Gospel, which she thereby positions as another tradition which to her mind shattered the closed-minded world of churchianity, and opened up the consideration that early Christianity (which did not get its identity till 300 years later anyway), was a much more mixed and varied phenomenon than what the canonical tradition holds it out to be. This personal approach makes it easy for other Christians, who are interested in widening their horizons to appreciate the sense of wonder Pagels seems to have about the Thomas Gospel, and clearly there is a large readership with those qualifications. The title Beyond Belief is therefore well chosen, and mention of Thomas appropriately is only in the subtitle, since it is hardly the main topic. I'm not sure if this is doing Thomas any favors, as I don't believe Christianity was his concern, the teachings of Jesus were, but that's because I do believe Thomas dates from 45-50, and thus he would the influence of Paul who was the real revisionist here, and the actual founder of Christianity. It is really after the year 60AD with the influence of Paul that the institutionalization of Jesus gets seriously under way. "Bitter idols have been made of him who would be only brother to the world," he says of himself in the Course (ACIM:C-5.5:7).

The first chapter uses these personal issues to qualify Pagels' approach to the task of discussing the Thomas Gospel, which she then develops in the lengthy second chapter by juxtaposing it with the Gospel according to John, going so far as to assume - without adducing any supporting research or evidence - that the Thomas Gospel dates from ca. 60-100 AD, and therefore may have been almost contemporaneous with John's Gospel (ca. 90 AD).  All of this frames the subject matter in a way that makes Jesus a sort of proto-Christian, and treats all Gospels as if they are alike. More specifically, it sets up the Thomas Gospel as if it is like the Gospel of John a theological product from several generations after Jesus, involved in a theological argument with the community of John. Most of this happens by implicit assumption, without reference to critical scholarship of Thomas - which might suggest otherwise.

It is true of course that in John there are several comments that indicate disagreement with the Thomas tradition, and I can see why for a doubting Christian this evidence of disunity in the early years is an interesting discovery. However bringing these personal issues to the subject without a critical accounting of them limits the treatment. As we can see here, how we look at the Thomas Gospel critically depends on how we place it historically in the tradition. If we conclude that like Q, it dates from the period of the first generation after Jesus, and that "sayings" gospels indeed constitute a more primitive literary form, which was more reporting than theologizing and interpreting, and which was only partially copied in the later narrative Gospels (synoptics) this would make the treatment of this book impossible. If, like Pagels does here, we assume that Thomas is of a later date, and 2 to 3, or even 4 generations after Jesus, like the Gospel of John, that means we do not assume it to be more original or authoritative, but rather a later interpretation, the differences with John and the synoptics come in a very different light.

In short, Pagels frames her argument in terms of her personal crisis of faith, and her primary audience therefore is by definition the millions of Christians who are having comparable doubts that the homogeneity of Christianity is not what it's cracked up to be. Thomas research has suffered from this sort of fog and obfuscation since the early days, and where Jean-Yves Leloup and others use this framework for a wide ranging speculative exploration of Thomas in a more New Age sort of way, Pagels frames it in the context of challenging her Christian standpoint, and her treatment in that sense is on a par with Bart D. Ehrman, a recovering fundamentalist like Pagels, except that Pagels remains more positive to Thomas than Ehrman does. While noting these limitations, I also want to emphasize, as I've argued elsewhere, that dropping the pretend-homogeneity of Christianity, and seeing it for the revisionist history that it is, is the first step towards attempting to listen to Jesus on his own terms, underneath or behind the beliefs about him which cloud our vision, just like the throngs of the crowds in the Markan stories often make it hard to get to him. There's no reason to listen to him as long as we are ourselves telling him what he should say. We need to first be curious about what he does say.

Along these lines Beyond Belief happily meanders on about early Christian history, and we might note that for the Johannine community to have a difference of opinion with the Thomas community their Gospels did not logically have to be contemporaneous. For the Gospel of John in the late first century to criticize the Thomas Gospel, the latter needs to preexist the former, that is hardly a tight argument however, for someone could say the comments aren't about the Gospel, but about the Thomasine community. In all however, the absence of Christian concepts in Thomas, the form of the Gospel itself, and the very reasonable reconstruction of the historical order of NT quotes, which makes it highly probable that Thomas predated the synoptics, are all short-circuited by this book's assumption of a date in the 60-100 AD range. And thus the bulk of the book does not explore why Jesus comes across so differently in Thomas, but again simply assumes Jesus is a proto-Christian and then thus it continues with explorations of the early Christian communities in an anachronistic fashion which makes all conversations of the first 300 years seem to happen in parallel within the framework of a Christianity that does not yet exist at that time.

In the course of tracking some of the more interesting ideas extant in the literature from those first few centuries Pagels does turn up some interesting ideas, some of which at least might be connected with Thomas material in a positive way, but she does not explore those possibilities, so the book on that level is more exposé than explanation, and the connecting tissue is Pagels' personal interest, not the Thomas Gospel. In a list of interesting highlights I would put her quote of a Westerner turned Buddhist, who says if he'd known the Thomas Gospel, he might not have been a Buddhist. Now that comment makes sense, but it is not developed at all. The book remains preoccupied with the wild growth of ideas in the centuries just after Jesus, and in the process it leads us up to the formation of the the NT canon by bishop Athanasius in 367. It explores how the canon was established, and what was left out, along the way connecting the time of the likely burial of the Nag Hammadi treasure trove with the time of the establishment of this canon of the then emergent Christian orthodoxy, ensuring that at least these books escaped the subsequent destruction that was to be the fate of most copies.

Other worthwhile themes that are highlighted are the notion that the Resurrection is a spiritual, not a physical event, as well as the related idea of the laughing Jesus on the cross, from the Apocalypse of Peter, and also a notion from the Gospel of Mary Magdalene that the Son of Man is within, not to mention the seeming prominence of Mary Magdalene in some of this literature. Different spiritual explanations of the virgin birth are listed, and amidst all this wild growth of spiritual exploration, we find bishop Irenaeus laboring away on his theory of the four-formed Gospel all of which is to lead up to the council of Nicea, the Nicene creed, and later the NT canon.  With a light brush stroke meanwhile the implication is raised that the Thomas Gospel was not written by Thomas at all but merely ascribed to him, which is a necessary assumption if Thomas was in India or dead at the time when Pagels has his Gospel being written. What is not clear is that while such practices were common in antiquity, why is it necessarily the case here, except to suit the theory of her counter-intuitive dating of the manuscript? And all the while bishop Irenaeus is still at it, whipping up his concepts of Christian orthodoxy.

By chapter 4 the book takes us on a fascinating exploration of Valentinus, who promoted an allegorical view of the literature, surely blasphemy for followers of a teacher who constantly repeated that he taught in parables, or at least so in the eyes of bishop Irenaeus. The world as a (bad) dream is a central feature in the Valentinian Gospel of Truth, and so is our responsibility for sight. There is a brief discussion of the Round Dance of the Cross, which brings out a parallel to the Buddhist teaching that by becoming aware of suffering we find release from it, a notion that to Course students would not sound unlike the notion that the miracle "looks on devastation," and "reminds the mind that what it sees is false." (ACIM:W.pII.13.1:3) Another very important topic is the discussion among the apostles in the Acts of John, where they all see Jesus differently. And so the exposé of heretical teachings continues, along with an account of Irenaeus' writings that seek to dismiss them and establish a proper orthodoxy. From him she quotes another fascinating report about a second "spiritual" baptism practiced among some gnostic groups: "Others performed apoloutrosis as a kind of spirtual marriage, which joins a person in union with one's "life hid with Christ in God," that is, the previously unknown part of ones'being which connects one with the divine." (p. 159) This practice was associated with acquiring true gnosis, and makes an interesting pre-cursor of the Course's notion of the Holy Relationship.

The final chapter of the book covers the exploits of the Emperor Constantine, lending his force to the establishment of a state religion which embodied the romantic notion of the Catholic Church, and the account seemingly naively reports that contrary to some reports Constantine left the Bishops collected at the Council of Nicea relatively free in their deliberations. One wonders if perhaps we need to be reminded who picked up the tab for that gathering? By the end of the book we have an interesting picture of many of the divergent issues of the first 400 years of pre-Christianity, up until the time when in 367 heretical books like Thomas were thrown out, and most of the discussion seems to be organized most directly by Pagels' own crisis of belief, which many doubting Christians might identify with. Little of the book really deals directly with the Gospel of Thomas, but the translation in the appendix reads nicely. It is based on Marvin Meyer's with some slight polish borrowed from the Scholar's Version of the Jesus seminar. What escapes notice is the idea that Christianity in the service of Caesar is pretty much the opposite of what Jesus taught, and a re-reading of Prof. G. J. Heering's The Fall of Christianity, might be in order. If we finally would understand such ideas, then we would also start to see the logic of why Thomas really is an early book, and its Jesus is not at all like the Jesus of Christianity, and some of those gnostic dudes might have made some sense. On the whole the book touches on so much that it probably serves to make the reader hungry for more specific information. And somehow or other it seemed to open the floodgates for an interest in Thomas.

An Alternate View of Nicea?

The evident message of Gary Renard's work clearly lies in his own struggles on the path, including falling down and getting up. This pertains both to what's in the books, and to his fairly public life since the books appeared. He has been willing to make his mistakes and learn from them, and then share them with us in the process. Quite a feat for a shy person! Secondarily, the underlying theme that the apostles needed numerous more lifetimes before they "got it" is equally an important part of the message, for it makes the whole thing more approachable, and teaches us to be patient with ourselves. For only infinite patience yields immediate results...

Seen in this light the Gospels are not absolute truths but the grappling of people who felt themselves attracted to Jesus, trying to describe a phenomenon which appealed to them but which in most cases they were very far from understanding. The implications of such a view is among other things that the apocryphal materials are quickly seen to be equally as important as the canonical materials, since what made the canon the canon was a completely arbitrary process, which had nothing to do with the content of Jesus' teachings, but everything with the political needs of the Emperor Constantine. From that point of view the Council of Nicea was not a triumph, but a tomb for the burial of Jesus' message, in which he was forever made subservient to the Emperor. Nicea gave to the Emperor that which is God's, and ensured that Jesus served at the pleasure of the Emperor, an early version of employment at will (whose will?!). So Nicea really is the clincher, which furthermore buries Jesus's teachings under the veneer of Christianity, soon to be suitably decked out with marble and gold, so we won't look any further. Behind the facade however, the momentary unity began to slowly crumble again, almost as soon as it was established.

This view is in line with Prof. G.J. Heering's thesis in The Fall of Chrisitianity, and I think it is a more productive way to look at those first four centuries after Jesus, for it is the natural resistance of the ego to the teachings of Jesus or the Holy Spirit, which compels us to deny them and mold them into something else, including using them as a justifications for the ego's fear, hatred, and murder, which is what really happened.

Historical Opinions as a Key to Thomas Translations

Below I would point out some of the key historical positions, and what they imply as to the views on Thomas of various commentators.

1) The position we embrace here, that Thomas came first, is of roughly the same age as Q, the tradition which Gary Renard refers to as The Words of the Master, and therefore it was a source for the other writers. John does not quote him directly, although he seems to go to some lenghts to discredit and refute him, which would likewise argue for pre-existence. This position is in my view the most common-sense view to take today, and it was mine already for some time, long before Pursah explained the story to Gary in Your Immortal Reality. I have covered this position in the first post on this blog, so I merely mention it here for the sake of completeness. The main points for this position are that the Thomas Gospel as a form predates the narrative gospels, the internal evidence that shows an absence of all the theological notions of later Christianity, eucharist, crucifixion, etc., and the likelihood that many Thomas sayings are quoted by later evangelists, as they do appear to represent early forms of many sayings. This position simply leaves it open that Gnostic sects could later have adopted Thomas, explaining the find at Nag Hammadi, without necessarily making Thomas a Gnostic document per se. Stevan Davies and the Jesus Seminar are mostly in this camp. There is a budding awareness in this group that Thomas shows us a very different Jesus from the notions which crystallize as "Chrstianity" later on, and very likely a more original one. This logic leads to a separation between the teachings of Jesus and Christianity, as being perhaps mostly unrelated, by dint of the fact that Paul and Peter c.s. in effect put their interpretations in Jesus' mouth.

2a) The good, or benign, or perhaps merely interesting Gnostic position. Here the Gnostic associations in Thomas are reinforced but seen as a positive. Deriving among other things from the fact that the Nag Hammadi library has a gnostic character, but also from the fact that self-knowledge and introspection are  inherent to the Thomas material, and thus of a gnostic character in the wider sense. This position tends to keep open a later dating of the book since the Gnostic development within Christianity does not happen in full force until the 2nd century AD. Jean-Yves Leloup is in this camp, so was Gilles Quispel, and Elaine Pagels is as well. There is an overall tendency among this group to pull Thomas into the history of Christianity. One can not very well argue that the Thomas Gospel was not together by 140 AD (the oldest Greek fragments), but anything more recent than c.a. 60 is safe, for it preserves a picture of the Jesus of Thomas in a sort of proto-Christian landscape, because with any timing later than 60 AD, the break represented by Paul is obfuscated. Some of these authors get fascinated by Thomas and other books of Nag Hammadi, and there is a certain polite curiosity about other modes of experiencing Jesus, but the tendency remains for the Christian mold not to be seriously questioned.

2b) The Bad Gnostic position. This position is argued mainly by writers who are beholden to the Christian tradition and the churches, and in order to save its relevance, they dismiss Thomas as a later book, of the late 1st or even the 2nd century, which was the date of the Oxyrrhynchus papyri (ca. 140 AD), and by taking this position Paul's position as the de facto founder of Christianity is protected because the issue of his evident corruption of Jesus' teachings never arises. This is the position of e.g. Bart D. Ehrman, and to such writers Thomas is at best an interesting curiosity, at worst a blasphemy or a fraud, really not unlike the line of bishop Irenaeus' writings against the heretics, though often with a more sophisticated and seemingly objective modern historical appearance.

There may be some further sub-categorizations here, but the above should be helpful in determining the slant of a translation. Other issues which unfortunately taint translations are attempts to make the book sound more "modern," and God-forbid, but yes, even a tendency political correctness exerts a corrupting influence on the faithfulness of some translations.