Thoughts on Autism

If all else fails consult the manual, or, if you're on the web, and at a loss for answers, consult Wikipedia, here on Autism. What stands out to me immediately are key phrases such as: "how this occurs is not understood."  Priceless. Meanwhile, they know it's a brain disorder, even though they don't understand how it happens, and nobody knows how meat thinks. So if you don't know how it happens, how can you know it's a brain disorder? Ah, the mysteries of modern medicine...
To clarify my sentiments a bit further, I'm the son of a psychiatrist, older brother of a youngest sister, who has symptoms "somewhat like autism," while however reams of psychiatrists, child- and otherwise, could never agree on what the exact classification of her symptoms was. My father raised me with a healthy dose of skepticism about the tenets of Western medicine. His own inability to deal with this issue in his own family undoubtedly was a living concern for him, and focused his mind on the limits of the would-be science of medicine.

What I remember is that my little sister was the center of all that happened in the family. Also, that there were many years when communication seemed to take place, even though she never learned to speak, but she had a terrific sense of humor and would laugh at the right times. She also had a great sense for people, and when my very bitter grandmother on my father's side would visit, she was guaranteed to cry all day until the woman left. One way or another she was the center of family life, and actually a joy to be around, though her needs of course had a tendency to impose a certain structure on those around her. In all it was always manageable to care for her at home, in particular since my father had his practice at home, and there was always help on that account. But the little sister was the center of family life.

Besides the experience of seeing all these brilliant doctors, my father's colleagues, who were all non-plussed by what the exact issue was with my sister, I think we mostly felt that she was a blessing, and the mostly non-verbal communication with her added a dimension to family life, which otherwise might have been much more fractious, and splintered completely earlier than it did. Having said that, I tend to think there was an element of subconscious blame games between my parents, and a practical development in which I tend to think that my mother in particular developed some saintly pretenses that the Lord had called her to devote her life to the care of this child, which began to take the place of her previous calling to support my father in his practice, and so I suspect that her total attention shifted to the child, who was placed on a pedestal as some sort of an angel, and the net effect of that may have been that my father was being frozen out and in retrospect it seems that by the time I was about 14 or 15 years old, there was a freeze in relations which ultimately led to a divorce, with my mother persisting in her saintly role, and never taking any responsibility for her part in changing the dynamics of the relationship, by de facto elevating her mother role to sainthood, at the expense of her wife-role. Needless to say it all exploded into complete and utter misunderstanding and an all around breakdown of family communications for the rest of our lives, with the little sister ending up in an institution, gradually deteriorating, and seemingly no longer really recognizing anyone of us.

In ca. ' 96/'98 I studied A Course in Miracles for some time with a brilliant family therapist in Riverdale, who was then in her late 70's and 80's and really had a lifetime's worth of experience. Along with what I was learning of how the mind really works from the Course, it was also her understanding of family dynamics which gave me new clues about the situation I grew up in, or at least a different way to look at it. Fundamentally her insight was that a family unit often times is a demonstration that the mind really is one, which all of us don't want to know, and therefore hate each other all the more, particularly because we really see ourselves in the other, and this effect is of course the strongest within the family unit. It was through her questioning that I became hip to the dynamic of my mother's making the child the absolute center of her life, and freezing out my father, and one thing that put me on to this was her probing into my own early puberty, and the notion that children often act out wildly if there is unspoken disharmony between the parents, and gradually I began to see a pattern. And so where on the surface it seemed that it was my father who became unfaithful, then it became clearer to me that there were other roots of the problem. And again on the whole it became very insightful to me to see how a family really is a dynamic system, that is truly one on a level that none of them consciously do understand or even want to understand. My ex-wife had an intuitive grasp of this, and an expression, namely, "everyone always knows everything." And this is very true, and it's threatening to us. Yet then there are paths like the Course, where the notion that the mind is one is brought out with great insight, and you begin to fathom that it is unnatural for minds not to communicate, but that the choice for the ego really entails a purposive breakdown of communications, which is a necessary expedient for the individual to prove itself, and as such simply part of the experience here in this life. However once we can look at this with some more disengagement, healing may become possible. And now it is about forgiveness, and recognizing that the issue is not whether the autism (or whatever it is) of my little sister could ever be healed (small chance later in life, when decline has set in), or could have been healed, if only... (blame game), but to forgive myself for the inherent "autism"  that represents the basic choice for the ego, and its illusion of a life separated from our source. If you read the descriptions of autism that way, and begin to forgive yourself, perhaps things can start to change.

At that stage, we can start to move beyond a lot of nonsense, and blame games, and simply recognize that the choice of being mentally handicapped, retarded, or autistic, a criminal, or whatever, is merely yet another form of acting out the separation, and therefore an opportunity to forgive ourselves for the "tiny, mad idea" in the growing awareness that we have the option to make another choice and that our brothers are actually our teachers who help us learn to make that other choice, when we're ready. Now changing anyone outside ourselves is no longer necessary, for the only thing we can change is our self. So all the attempts to heal and fix everybody around us are then recognized as part of the insanity of the dream of separation, and we can focus on simply doing the most loving thing, and that begins with forgiving, forgiving, and more forgiving, and then we'll know what you do or don't need to do as the most loving thing in the world, including how to deal with a "mentally disadvantaged" sibling or child. For our natural inclination in our attempts to "help," are usually little else but ways of trying to remake our brothers in our own image, which we immodestly presume to be "healthy"  and "normal," and thereby we miss out on the opportunity for healing ourselves, by keeping the problem outside of us, in someone else. 

It is no sacrifice that he be saved, for by his freedom will you gain your own. To let his function be fulfilled is but the means to let yours be. And so you walk toward Heaven or toward hell, but not alone. How beautiful his sinlessness will be when you perceive it! And how great will be your joy, when he is free to offer you the gift of sight God gave to him for you! He has no need but this; that you allow him freedom to complete the task God gave to him. Remembering but this; that what he does you do, along with him. And as you see him, so do you define the function he will have for you, until you see him differently and let him be what God appointed that he be to you. (ACIM:T-25.V.5)

On Islam -- Happy Father's Day

Surrender is the most difficult thing to the ego to understand, because it is totally invested in what ACIM calls fighting God for His Authorship. We want to be original, and we want to be right, but (un)fortunately we are neither. While formal religions have little appeal for me, and Islam is no exception, I've often found solace with some of the Sufi wise men, from the ridiculous, like Mullah Nasruddin, to the sublime, like Rumi, or Tierno Bokar, and I've sometimes found beautiful and profound verses in the Qur'an (my favorite edition listed hereby). But most of all, the very word Islam is what inspires me, and I recognize in it the first step in the forgiveness process as A Course in Miracles teaches it.

Islam means surrender, and the very first step of the forgiveness process in the Course, is really to surrender the arrogance of the ego, and to open myself up to the possibility that maybe, just maybe Jesus could be right and I could be wrong. As long as I stubbornly maintain that I'm right, I cannot ever take back the projection of guilt on others and ask for help. And the miracle lies exactly in the fact that a shift, a change of mind is possible, by asking for guidance from the Holy Spirit and the right mind, in lieu of from our ego, which got us into trouble in the first place. As a refresher here are the three steps of forgiveness, the way out of conflict any time you see yourself getting stuck (again!):

1. "Would I accuse myself of doing this?" I.e. this means to question the validity of the ego's perception that some SOB out there is making my life miserable, and instead to entertain the notion that I might have something to do with it, and that what I'm accusing the other of is, in some different form, a secret self-accusation. Here is an applicable quote from the Course:
   "Forgiveness should be practiced through the day, for there will still be many times when you forget its meaning and attack yourself. When this occurs, allow your mind to see through this illusion as you tell yourself:
   
   Let me perceive forgiveness as it is. Would I accuse myself of doing this? I will not lay this chain upon myself. (ACIM:W-134.17:1-5)
   In other words, at this point I've taken my projection back, and because now the problem is not outside of me (where I cannot change it), but inside of me, so that I can now change it. And the way to change it is with a change of mind, what Jesus calls metanoia in the Greek of the New Testament.
2. Now comes the only decision, the only exercise of free will ever, having raised the ego's guidance to doubt, we are now free to ask for the guidance of the Holy Spirit, and in the process freed ourselves from the ridiculous chains of having to know everything, or, more accurately, having to pretend to know everything, for now we have deferred judgment, and we are asking for Help from the one who does know everything, the Holy Spirit. The point of surrender lies in what the Course calls 'looking at the problem as it is' (ACIM:T-27.VII.2:2) and that passage continues with: 'and not the way that you have set it up.' Thus what we are surrendering is our problem definition, which then opens the way for the solution to arise. The ego would tenaciously hang on to the problem, because this defines its separate identity.
3. Now we leave it to the Holy Spirit. And what we learn subsequently is that it is not a sacrifice to surrender our judgment (or should we say our stupidity?) to Him, but it is the way out of the ego's Hell.

The guided meditation which Gary Renard offers in his workshops and books is also a beautiful way of reinforcing the forgiveness process, by starting and ending your day with a brief meditation in which you visualize a white light (God's Love) which slowly surrounds you, and you lay on the altar as your gifts to him all your childish definitions of what the problems are, and what the answers should be, thus making room for the Answer to show up, instead of continuing to kill yourself with thinking it's my way or the highway. Once you let go of those ego shackles, you can totally submerse yourself in the experience of God's Love surrounding you. This is the way to accepting the sonship, to seeking the second place to gain the first, to realizing that no-one comes to the father but through me - not Jesus as a person, but the manifestation of the Sonship as he realized it, and demonstrated it. The prodigal son, re-becomes the Son, by letting go of his plan for salvation, and accepting anew the Sonship as the only fulfillment possibility. In the end then, it is for the mind to let go of its mistaken belief in the ego, for the ego isn't anything except a mis-thought, a tiny mad idea, that makes us very unhappy as long as we maintain our allegiance to it, and waste our days in justifying it. Happy Father's day.

The Bastards Don't Deserve It... Forgiveness that Is.

That is Gary Renard's frequent joke, and an important one, for just like Logion 13, it is an important lesson in why Yeshua's teachings are not very popular in the world. Never have been. We want to hang on to our identity, and to do so we must maintain conflict, for personality and individuality are thoughts of hate, that must be fed by maintaining a suitable list of enemies. And so the justification of our righteous anger comes so natural, that we really get blindsided time and again, by those seemingly so honest feeling that it is impossible to forgive, and we do not want to know that we're only killing ourselves with it, that it is the choice for the crucifxion. Hence the Course also says:

Do not make the pathetic error of "clinging to the old rugged cross." The only message of the crucifixion is that you can overcome the cross. Until then you are free to crucify yourself as often as you choose. This is not the gospel I intended to offer you. We have another journey to undertake, and if you will read these lessons carefully they will help prepare you to undertake it. (ACIM:T-4-in.3:7-11)

Forgiveness completely flies in the face of our justified anger, and that is also why the temptation is so great to want to improve on ACIM, and become an "important teacher," rather than learning it yourself, and teaching by learning the Navajo way. The only way to do it is to do it. That is the shortcut (with thanks to Ken Wapnick for that remark). In short the way to be an ACIM teacher in reality is to know you don't matter at all, and it's all a comedy.

Forgiveness, on the other hand, is still, and quietly does nothing. It offends no aspect of reality, nor seeks to twist it to appearances it likes. It merely looks, and waits, and judges not. He who would not forgive must judge, for he must justify his failure to forgive. But he who would forgive himself must learn to welcome truth exactly as it is. (ACIM:T-pII.1.4)

As a little side note, also the speeches of Dutch Queen Juliana in 1952, including when she spoke to the American congress, on her interest in a way out of conflict on a global level, in the concept of the Third Way, which was on her mind in those days, is an example of how the message of peace, the mere thought of it, is anathema to the world. In her case, it would appear that quite possibly her husband, Prince Bernhard, even hatched a plot to have her dethroned, and put his daughter Beatrix on the throne (then just turned 18), all to the greater glory of Lockheed and mutually assured destruction. He of course more than anyone seems to have turned Holland into a banana republic, or rather, an armsdealing republic. It is a story that has not yet been fully told, but some day it will, and it makes for a nice reflection of what the world does really believe in, and why it is the Course says, that the world was made as an attack on God.

The world was made as an attack on God. It symbolizes fear. And what is fear except love's absence? Thus the world was meant to be a place where God could enter not, and where His Son could be apart from Him. Here was perception born, for knowledge could not cause such insane thoughts. But eyes deceive, and ears hear falsely. Now mistakes become quite possible, for certainty has gone. (ACIM:W-pII.3.2)

And again this ties in closely to another theme that runs through the Thomas gospel materials, namely the notion that these are the teachings which Jesus dispenses privately, he did then, and he does now. For only in the forgiveness moments, in the miracle, do we individually become teachable because it means we surrendered our judgment, and so we listen for the first time in a long time. And then quickly we forget it again, because we are deadly afraid of it. So it has nothing to do with the teachings being secret, or Jesus secretive, but it has everything to do that we remain outsiders of the mystery of forgiveness unless and until we practice it, and therein lies the meeting with the Master, that Internal Teacher, who is available to us whenever we really ask his Help, in complete surrender of our own judgment, and constant urge to be right and know better.

On Giving Birth

What danger can assail the wholly innocent? What can attack the guiltless? What fear can enter and disturb the peace of sinlessness? What has been given you, even in its infancy, is in full communication with God and you. In its tiny hands it holds, in perfect safety, every miracle you will perform, held out to you. The miracle of life is ageless, born in time but nourished in eternity. Behold this infant, to whom you gave a resting place by your forgiveness of your brother, and see in it the Will of God. Here is the babe of Bethlehem reborn. And everyone who gives him shelter will follow him, not to the cross, but to the resurrection and the life. (ACIM:T-19.IV.C.10)

Observant people have often realized that dying is a continual process, that is entirely part of this life. Just look back, how many phases of your life have completely died off, and it feels now as if you were a different person then, and yet, when you lost that job, that relationship, or some other situation, it seemed like death, like a huge loss, like a sacrifice, but the facts prove that it was not, if you learn to forgive and let go. Or, if you want to give in to our sado/masochist tendencies, you can spend the rest of your life beating yourself up about the past and making yourself miserable. We certainly have that option, but it's a choice. Plato discusses the fear of death beautifully in pointing out that we're merely on this side of a door, and cannot see the other side until we pass through, but it's not the end, and he also clearly understand that throughout our lives we pass through such doors of transition in the psychological sense, the death of the body is merely another one of those. Reflecting on this more deeply, we might begin to understand why dying is a psychological process. By the same logic giving birth is a psychological process. It all boils down to the choice between the ego or the Holy Spirit as our teachers, and the choice happens continuously in every moment, except we're not usually aware of it. The essence of the choice is between form and content, between the body or spirit, between manifest and latent, between duality and oneness, murder or love, death or life etc. The point being that forms (Saturn) are constructs of time and space, which only exist temporarily, and sooner or later all waste away, and if we dedicate our lives to preserving form we commit ourselves to dying with them, while the choice for life is the choice for spirit, in which we realize that form does not matter and the Holy Spirit will give us whatever forms to work with that are most useful at the time, until they go and we move on.

In mythology the image of "son" is often used to symbolize the effect of our choices, just like in real life (as any good family therapist will tell you) the children mirror their own choices back to the parents, and this is why children can be so maddening if the parents live in denial in any way shape or form. At some point most parents become aware that children have the annoying habit of learning what you do, not what you say, and to that extent clearly the children are helping the parents grow up, more so than the other way around. The Dutch spiritual teacher J. W. Kaiser (JWK) calls children in this sense our "self of tomorrow," quite in the spirit of "by their fruits shall ye know them." In short, what we experience reflects our choices at this level, and our experience in life in that sense is our son, who reflects back to us what we choose to be. Kaiser's brilliant translation, commentary, and explanation of the Gospel according to Mark, (Beleving van het Evangelie, not available in English). Kaiser understood that what mattered about the story is hardly the manifest content, as Paul and eventually Christianity would have it, but the latent, or inner meaning of the story, which of course merely reflects what is going on in the mind, and which can become clear to us through experience if we ourselves make the inner choice to follow Jesus, or the Holy Spirit, as no doubt he did in order to be able to read the book in the way he did.

The rest is very simple in every situation we have a choice of teacher (in the terminlogy of A Course in Miracles), or "father" in terms of the Biblical myths. Our soul (Mary/Miriam - etymologically meaning "in revolt, in uprising" as per JWK) when it rises up to the dictates of time, and begins looking for "another way" (as did Helen Schucman and Bill Thetford in the developments that led to ACIM- See Ken Wapnick's Absence from Felicity), and in this condition we will realize that we may be "betrothed" to a figure in time (Joseph, again as per JWK), but we are not fulfilled by what the Course calls special relationships, our deepest longing and our life's purpose can only be fulfilled by choosing the Holy Spirit, who thus becomes the Father, of what we ourselves are then becoming, as reflected in the quotation from ACIM above. Forgiveness is the process where this birth takes place, again and again and again, when we choose against the ego past as the father of our life of tomorrow (symbolized by Joseph in the story), and for the Holy Spirit as the father of our "child." And so the way of the spirit is a matter of active choice, choice for content over form, in full awareness that forms come and go, and in letting go of our attachment to them, what is eternal in us will be reborn to us - the theme of Gary Renard's book Your Immortal Reality.

In terms of the Thomas Gospel, there are many sayings which reflect this choice possibility, such as Logion 13, and Logion 42, "Be passersby," which puts us in the position of observer of "our life" so that we can start seeing it, rather than being it, and thereby put ourselves in a position to make another choice through forgiveness, and so letting the Holy Spirit run our life, instead of the ego, which merely wants us to play the hero of the story, and to act on the manifest content, and continue to keep us mindlessly and permanently embroiled in the world. So living in the now in this sense means not responding to situations from the past, but truly approaching every day, and every moment like it is the beginning of the rest of your life, and deciding if you want to continue in ego-hell, which is form first, never mind the content (murder), or choose the Holy Spirit instead, which means content (spirit) first, and leaving the form to Him, and assume the way back to Heaven, where all nice childern (all of us, whenever we're ready) go.

The Original or a Copy?

The central theme that always attracted me to the notion of the Thomas Gospel was the idea that it was closer to the original, than the later descriptions of Jesus which we know from the New Testament. I always like to make clear that there's nothing wrong with liking Paul's version, but I do wonder did he HAVE to call it Christianity? Why not be honest and call it Paulinity? Oh well, it would be a little late to change that now, so let's just leave that as a joke, which is how I intended it: seriously tongue in cheek. But you get my point.

In the last thirty years or so a small but growing group of people are finding a connection to the voice which the recognize as Jesus' through A Course In Miracles, which saw the light in 1975. And it did not take for too long or the book gave rise to whole shelves full of literature. The vast majority of that literature quotes the book for the author's own purposes, and simply uses Course material out of context. No doubt all of this happens with the best intentions, but that does not guarantee anything. The standout among the crowd of Course literature undoubtedly is Ken Wapnick, who originally helped Helen Schucman to prepare the book for print, and who always had an affinity for teaching this material. His books are the standard, and their forte is that they do not EVER add anything to the Course, but essentially always explains the Course with the Course, Ken just knows it so well, he is always able to pull together related materials and help you deepen your understanding. When he does speak about other things, it is in a manner of re-integrating those from a Course perspective, never mixing up the Course. He is also thoroughly modest, because he fully understands that the very point of his teaching work is NOT to add anything to the Course, but simply help people understand it. This is why he's been heard to say when people ask him to write his biography, that it's irrelevant, and he frequently jokes about his workshops, and why people keep coming back, as he says the same thing all the time.

And then there's Gary Renard, to whose work I owe so much. The series title for his books could have been "A Course in Miracles for Dummies," in the understanding that we're all dummies when we start the Course. Gary's claim to fame is that he explains the Course in the vernacular, and that's fair. But it's also the context of the books that makes the Course more approachable, we the readers are simply identifying with the hero of these adventures, and learning the Course along with him. To make it easy and eliminate all sorts of undesirable associations, he calls Jesus simply "J". His books are very much "real life," really the adventure stories of by now about 20 years of Gary's life, as he is learning the Course. They are irreverent, fun, occasionally almost slapstick comedy, and they offer us all plenty of chances to identify with the hero of the story and learn from his experiences.

The rest of the books about the Course tend to run from outright attempts to argue that the Course says things it does not say, even though the book is of amazing consistency, to books which use ideas and concepts from the Course in the context of their author's own presentation, which is OK, though it can be problematic if there seems to be a suggestion that such books represent the Course, when they clearly do not. Like so many people my initial coming to the Course went via another author, Jerry Jampolsky, whose books I devoured within a month in '91, and by that time I was wondering why I wasn't reading the Course itself instead of the numerous quotes in those books, and then, when I did start reading the Course, I found out that it was saying something very different than the way I had found it quoted in those books. In much the same way, Marianne Williamson brought more people to the Course than anybody else, but she uses it in her own way. I'm personally not too interested in most of that "almost" Course literature, and I get much more about say reading Alan Kershaw's biography of Hitler, as a way of realizing just how the ego mind works, and again, looking at it in a very different light.

But, this current experience is also higly illustrative of what happened in the gap between Jesus and Paul. And it should be emphasized that the thing we know as Christianity was only one of thousands of flavors who all considered themselves Christians. If you actually took the trouble to read Paul's letters, you would find there his gradual development of his interpretation of Jesus. And while Christianity may work for many people, if it's Jesus you're interested in, again, as long as you can get the original, why get the copy? The Germans had a beautiful expression for cheap plastic knockoffs arriving from Hong Kong and Japan in the postwar years, "Ganz wie echt aber viel schöner." (Just like the real thing, but much nicer). That says it all. This ties in with e.g. Logion 113 of Thomas, where Jesus says, as the disciples ask him when the Kingdom will come, "It will not come by watching for it. It will not be said, 'Behold here,' or 'Behold there.' Rather, the Kingdom of the Father is spread out upon the earth, and people do not see it." And so the best way for the ego to defend against the Kingdom is to ratchet up the production of knockoffs, so that we should continue not to see it, and be distracted by cheap substitutes of our own making, so much so that the substitutes are wildly more popular. The only difference now is that the Course is widely available, and has already sold millions of copies, not to mention is currently available in 18 languages, although there are knockoffs available too. So if you want to read it, get yourself the 3rd edition from the Foundation for Inner Peace, who are the original publishers authorized by Helen Schucman and Bill Thetford, and fully endorsed by them. Stick to the original.

To come back to Paul one moment, once you start getting it why Jesus is talking about something else altogether, it would also seem understandable why his teaching would get distorted. The gap between Jesus (33CE) and the Pauline letters in itself was only 30 years, and if the Thomas gospel is from 50CE and the letters from Paul starting in 60-65CE, that was 10-15 years out of that total span. The notion of Pursah in Gary's books is by implication that the sayings collection grew from the ca 70/71 she regards as authentic, to the 114 that were found at Nag Hammadi, by picking up extra material that was not originally part of it.
♦

Do We Want the Problem or the Solution?

Duh, you think, of course I want the solution. Not so fast. Our ego system is a lot craftier than that, and as kids instinctively know, but frustrated parents often ignore, it pays to observe what we do do, and not obfuscate matters by paying attention to what we say we do. And what we do do is to hang on to the problem like a dog to a bone. Byron Katie is demonstrating with her work, The Work. In A Course in Miracles, it is expressed as follows:

Seek not outside yourself. For it will fail, and you will weep each time an idol falls. Heaven cannot be found where it is not, and there can be no peace excepting there. Each idol that you worship when God calls will never answer in His place. There is no other answer you can substitute, and find the happiness His answer brings. Seek not outside yourself. For all your pain comes simply from a futile search for what you want, insisting where it must be found. What if it is not there? Do you prefer that you be right or happy? Be you glad that you are told where happiness abides, and seek no longer elsewhere. You will fail. But it is given you to know the truth, and not to seek for it outside yourself. (ACIM:T-29.VII.1)

And we all think, when we first read this, that of course we'd rather be happy, and we are thus fooling ourselves, with the PR version of our own lives. As Byron Katie also asks, who would we be without our story? So the bottom line is that our ego identity is all wrapped up in the tale of woe which is our life, and we hang on to the problem like a dog to a bone, and no way do we prefer to be happy, all our protestations to the contrary. Everything we do is geared to validating our ego-identity. This is why Jesus was not understood 2,000 years ago. And the next point is to observe that it is completely natural that we would not understand him. Now if you've followed some of the examples of how the world reconstructed Jesus' identity in adapting the simple sayings of the Thomas gospel, and making something else out of them, then you begin to fathom the tremendous psychological resistance to accepting what Jesus was saying. For what our ego hears is that his "Kingdom not of this world" implies that we were wrong, and he was right. No way were we going to have that. Not then, not now. That's being honest about it.

Accordingly, my point in demonstrating this process of the reconstruction of Jesus in the transition from the sayings in Thomas (his actual teachings) to the story of the narrative gospels (somebody else's teachings about him), based on the analysis by Stevan Davies, is not to demonstrate that Mark (or anybody) got it wrong. The more important point is to see it as a mirror, and understand that we all get it wrong all the time, and the way he was misconstrued then, is an example of how we misconstrue him today. The joke in Course circles was often that we want Jesus to find us parking spaces, when we get to the workshop. In other words, we want to make the problem good and real, according to the way we have set up our lives, and then ask him to fix it. We completely ignore the fact that we created the problem in the first place and that the purpose of the problem is to keep him safely outside our doors, and our ego firmly in charge. We absolutely insist that instead of listening to him, we are in charge of defining the problem, and then telling him to fix it, as if he were a car mechanic. This is the process we are watching as it unfolds, when we follow the metamorphosis from Jesus the teacher, as he speaks to us in the Thomas gospel, to Jesus the Christian savior, as he is portrayed in the Pauline culture which became Christianity. All the narrative gospels were written after Paul started his preaching and writing, interpreting Jesus in his own way. And now we can understand why.

Much like Gary Renard, I like sometimes to try and shock people into this recognition by using as a point of departure the notion that Jesus was not a Christian. Then you can explain it historically, but few people realize the meaning of it. However when you see the examples I'm discussing here recently (and which I'll continue), then you begin to realize just how profound the change is. It is the transition from Jesus the Teacher of the way out of Hell, who asks us to take responsibility for our lives, and follow him, to Jesus-as-Santa-Claus, the savior who, through vicarious salvation makes it all-right, and meanwhile we don't have to do anything, except believe that it's so. That's the Maitreya role, and anything along those lines sees the problem and the solution to it outside of ourselves, so we get to have our cake and eat it too.

Logion 13 and Mark 8:27-33

The following is again based on Stevan Davies' discussion of Mark's use of the Gospel of Thomas, Part I, and part of my ongoing exploration on how the nature of Jesus's teachings was altered in the transition from the simple sayings of Thomas to the narrative gospels which began to appear on the scene 10, 15 and 20 years later.

Logion 13 is fascinating, even without the additions Pursah offers to it in The Disappearance of the Universe, in which she proposes what the three things were - which of course the whole world has been guessing at ever since the text was discovered. Here is the text in the Pursah rendering from Your Immortal Reality:

J said to the disciples, "Compare me to something and tell me what I'm like."
Simon Peter said to him, "You are just like an angel."
Matthew said to him, "You are like a wisdom teacher."
Thomas said to him, "Master, my mouth is utterly unable to say what you are like."
And he took him, and withdrew, and spoke three sayings to him. When Thomas came back to his friends, they asked him, "What did J say to you?" Thomas said to them, "If I tell you one fo the sayings he spoke to me, you will pick up rocks and stone me, and fire will come from the rocks and consume you."

Mark, 8:27-33 (NIV):

Peter's Confession of Christ
27 Jesus and his disciples went on to the villages around Caesarea Philippi. On the way he asked them, "Who do people say I am?"
28 They replied, "Some say John the Baptist; others say Elijah; and still others, one of the prophets."
29 "But what about you?" he asked. "Who do you say I am?" Peter answered, "You are the Christ.^[a]"
30 Jesus warned them not to tell anyone about him.

Jesus Predicts His Death
31 He then began to teach them that the Son of Man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders, chief priests and teachers of the law, and that he must be killed and after three days rise again.
32 He spoke plainly about this, and Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him.
33 But when Jesus turned and looked at his disciples, he rebuked Peter. "Get behind me, Satan!" he said. "You do not have in mind the things of God, but the things of men."

Again, we can only be amazed at the difference, as Jesus becomes domesticated through the subsequent editing of the tradition about him (instead of: of him). For one thing, of course in the context of the emerging orthodoxy, it is Peter who gives the winning answer, though up to that point the gist of the story might be somewhat comparable with the Thomas version, namely that the world is not ready (by definition) to hear Jesus's teachings of a Kingdom not of this world. However the further framing of the story in the Markan context again hijacks the pure teaching, and frames it now in the Christian mold where the upcoming death of Jesus is of the essence, and his presumed suffering beginning to be construed as an important sacrifice ordained by God, which is very, very different from the simple image which is evoked by the notion of simply saying that the world is not ready to hear this message. Peter's recognition of Jesus as "the Christ," likewise serves the Christian purpose of validating Jesus as special, and a "savior," when the point of his teaching was exactly the other way around. The section headings of the NIV reinforce this Christian theological slant even more.
With the availability of the Course and the deeper psychological understanding which it fosters, we can now also increasingly understand why it is that we do resist the message so much, namely because our ego has us convinced that accepting the atonement will be the end of us, when the truth is that it would be the end of the ego, not of us as who we are in truth -- namely spirit. In other words the risk is that we would be happy, instead of miserably hanging on to the ego.
The original teaching of Logion 13 makes that simple point, which in the story Thomas is apparently beginning to appreciate, namely that the world really is not ready to hear Jesus's message, nor will it ever be, by definition, based on the understanding that the world was made as an attack on God, being the embodiment of the ego-thought of separation from God. Jesus's message, or the atonement, after all is the message that the separation did not happen, so neither the ego, nor the world it projects are real. The only thing that is real and eternal is the love of God, and what keeps it out of awareness is our identification with the ego-self, the false self, the persona, and that is how our ego keeps us wrapped around the axle, fearing we will perish when we accept the atonement for ourselves, when instead it is the ego which will perish, and which we are NOT, in spite of its best efforts to convince us otherwise.
Thus the real issue is not that the scribes and Pharizees, or whoever, out in the world, is not accepting "Jesus," but rather the other way around, that we don't take responsibility for the fact that we don't accept him, while the Course is really showing us the mechanisms why we don't and helps us to remove the cloaking of the ego, and learn to look at its seething snake pit of hatred with the love of Jesus beside us, so that ultimately we should be able to forgive ourselves for what the Course calls the "tiny, mad, idea" of the separation, and laugh it all away with Jesus, as he also suggests in the Course. The critical passage is:

Let us return the dream he gave away unto the dreamer, who perceives the dream as separate from himself and done to him. Into eternity, where all is one, there crept a tiny, mad idea, at which the Son of God remembered not to laugh. In his forgetting did the thought become a serious idea, and possible of both accomplishment and real effects. Together, we can laugh them both away, and understand that time cannot intrude upon eternity. It is a joke to think that time can come to circumvent eternity, which means there is no time. (ACIM:T-27.VIII.6)

A Vast Illusion

 The discussion of the holographic model of our experiential world, the "universe," in this context would not be complete without mentioning this book by Ken Wapnick, which is the most comprehensive summary of the things A Course in Miracles  teaches about the phenomenal world of time and space, and is therefore also pertinent to a discussion of Gary Renard's work. As the case may be, the very lively dialog that makes up Gary's books actually covers the subject in a casual way, but nevertheless manages to be fairly comprehensive, the only problem being it's strewn all over the books. The problem is similar with the Course itself, because it has a symphonic structure, and if you want to explore this topic, in A Vast Illusion you find it all in one place.

The book dates from 1990 and is based on an original set of classes at the Foundation for A Course in Miracles, when it was still located in Crompond, NY, which at some time had been released as a tape set. In the introduction the book warns that it is not meant for students not familiar with the basic tenets of A Course In Miracles, its purpose being rather to assist the long term student in pulling together into one picture all of the materials about the metaphysics of time from across all three books. As best as possible I'll summarize here what the book covers. It really falls into three parts, I, The Origin and Nature of Time, II, The Plan of the Atonement - The Miracle, and III The End of Time.

This is one of those topics in the Course that makes you realize it was no accident when Helen Schucman, a super bright intellectual herself, said at the end of her dictation experience which produced the Course: " Finally God for intellectuals."  The treatment of this particular topic definitely falls into that category. Yet somewhere along the way you also come to realize that your failure to understand these things is not a limitation of your intellect, but fear. For in the process the Course completely reframes all of what we thought we understood of ourselves, and more often than not do the things we seem to fail to grasp at first become clear in experiences we have based on actually practicing what the Course says. And therein ultimately lies the point of the teaching that:  "No rules are idly set, and no demands are made of anyone or anything to twist and fit into the dream of fear. Instead, there is a wish to understand all things created as they really are. And it is recognized that all things must be first forgiven, and then understood." (ACIM:T-30.V.1: 4-6) In other words as long as we keep hanging on to the ego's narrow framework, we are our own biggest impediment to understanding anything at all. Yet when we do take the leap, suddenly everything appears crystal clear. So different from the ego's obfuscations--which "twist and fit things into the dream of fear"-- and where oftentimes the "mysteries of the faith"  are cited to prevent us from questioning the exact points where the ego does not make sense, what is on offer here is a higher level of understanding that comes as we let go of those contorted answers that tried in vain to fit things " into the dreams of fear." The answers come as we let go of the narrow frame of reference that blocked our sight for too long already.

The first section of the book basically pulls together the underpinnings of the metaphysics of time and space, as they are presented in the Course. The resulting model is a holographic representation which aligns closely with the models of the experiential world that have emerged from quantum mechanics, with one important additional step: the big bang in fact is the physical manifestation of the projection of guilt from the mind, and the practical expression of the separation thought. This may seem baffling at first, when you read it like this, but actually giving it a try and practicing forgiveness as the Course suggests it, can put us in touch with a growing awareness that this whole concept makes sense, and is validated in those experiences.

This automatically brings us to the 2nd part of the book, the Plan of the Atonement, or the forgiveness process as taught by the Course, which is the "plan" of the Holy Spirit to help us let go of the sin, guilt, and fear, which we think define our existence, since after all we think we are really here. To put it differently, the ego thought, the thought of separation culminates in a feeling of loneliness in a bodily identity, combined with a profound existential guilt, that is ultimately grounded in the sense that we "threw it all away," and so we are caught in the Catch-22 of wanting to reaffirm the reality of who we are not (i.e. the role we play in the dream that is this life), spending all our energy on the persistent temper tantrum to prove that we're here and important, all of which reinforces the feeling of guilt about the separation.  The only way out must come from outside that self-reinforcing delusional system, and this is represented in the Course as the Holy Spirit, our memory of Heaven, and Jesus as the manifestation thereof, by virtue of the fact that he has fully identified with the Holy Spirit in remembering who he is in truth, and showing us how we can regain that memory too, by following him in the daily practice of living and the constant application of forgiveness, thus choosing incrementally to return to the original moment of the cosmic choice for the " tiny mad idea"  of the separation, and to make the other choice, for forgiveness, Love and the Holy Spirit, thus undoing the ego's belief system and the world of separation upheld by it.

And part III then covers the culmination of this whole process within the dream in what the Course calls the Real World, i.e. the experience of living in the knowledge of the Atonement, that nothing really happened, and all is forgiven. This also implies living in the full awareness of the primacy of spirit, and according no reality to the physical universe other than as a conduit for teaching, and helping our brothers. The final end of the process is what the Course calls God's Last Step, or the complete return to the oneness of the Father and the Son.

The end result of this whole presentation is a very complete and crystal clear metaphysics, in which it is seen that the entire experience of time and space, is nothing but an occurrence within the mind, which gives expression to the thought of separation, but is never real, only an illusion, upheld only by the strenuous efforts of our ego's to justify it, which we do by continuing to project the cause for the mess of our lives onto other people, starting with our parents, and continuing with all those who are nearest and dearest to us, or if the need arises our enemies, which can justify anything and everything. This illusion seems vast to us, but Jesus in the Course pokes fun at us and our self-importance by referring to the separation idea, as nothing but a "tiny, mad idea."  (ACIM:T-19.IV.C.5:6)