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.

Gary in the News Again?

All terms are potentially controversial, and those who seek controversy will find it. 2 Yet those who seek clarification will find it as well. 3 They must, however, be willing to overlook controversy, recognizing that it is a defense against truth in the form of a delaying maneuver. 4 Theological considerations as such are necessarily controversial, since they depend on belief and can therefore be accepted or rejected. 5 A universal theology is impossible, but a universal experience is not only possible but necessary. 6 It is this experience toward which the course is directed. 7 Here alone consistency becomes possible because here alone uncertainty ends. (ACIM:C-in.2)

 Spring has sprung, and criticism of Gary's work is circulating again, and once more in connection with the Circle of Atonement. Yet another author with new material on Thomas has come on the air, one Bruce F. MacDonald, Ph.D. His Thomas book can be found here: The Thomas Book, and his unfortunate criticism of Gary's work is here: Bruce MacDonald's contentions on "GaryRenard's Stolen Gospel". Predictably, a number of people have come to me in recent days for comment on this material, because of my own book on the subject - to which this blog is dedicated. (I am slowly moving my material here, from my Xanga blog at http://rogierfvv.xanga.com.)

Curiously, the author relies once again on the discredited journalistic drive-by shooting that appeared in the form of a series of articles in Miracles Magazine a few years ago, for which to my knowledge at least Jon Mundy, the publisher of said magazine, has publicly apologized at one point. I have perused the website on MacDonald's book a bit, and it seems to me that he comes from a very different frame of reference than Gary does, and it's not clear to me what purpose could possibly be served by his pretty pointless accusation of plagiarism. Simply put, it is very hard to be original in these types of translations, and I say that after following Thomas translations in 4 languages for the past 40 years. You either believe Gary's explanation of how he received the translated text which is published in his books, or you don't. That much is a personal decision. I will have no truck with any one who chooses not to believe Gary's story, but it does not overly bother me either. To each his own, I simply am not interested in the controversy. For me at least, this gratuitous attack on Gary hardly enhances the credibility of what the book might have to say. On the most practical level, it simply represents another viewpoint, and if disbelief in Gary's work is part of that viewpoint, so be it.

Almost every word choice and turn of phrase in the Pursah version could be traced to one translation or another, and I have most of them here on my shelf, and have studied those differences in the process of writing my book. However it was my conclusion at the time of writing my book, that it was pointless to study a comparison of the Pursah material with the historical texts, except to become aware of when she makes deliberate changes, or offers unique and different word choices. In other words, the informational value is in the deliberate differences, not in the parts that are the same as, or similar to other translations. Prior to the appearance of Gary Renard's Your Immortal Reality, Gary once told me that Pursah's favorite translation was actually Meyer's own translation, and NOT the one he did with Patterson. Be that as it may, the controversy seems pretty petty to me. Either you believe Gary's story or you don't, and the need to pick an argument with him has little to do with the content of his books. By the same token, MacDonald's book may contain valuable information for some people, regardless of the controversy, it does however simply come from a totally different frame of reference than does the Course. I see no need to make a fuss over that.

Looking at the Pursah material as Gary has published it, and the way she frames her historical argument on the state of the text, her point is that some of the Logia are more corrupted than others. It is in line with that observation that I would suggest to pay attention to the informational value of when Pursah chooses to make different choices than the standard text, and/or different choices in terms of the translation. The material contribution that the Pursah text makes in that regard consists of the dismissal of about one third of the collection which we have in the form of the Nag Hammadi text (which dated from the 4th century CE), which she declares to be corrupted beyond all recognition. For the rest of the material she simply thinks that some of it was transmitted to us relatively unscathed, and in that respect it makes complete sense that the only possible issue could be about a word choice here or there, but in some instances she makes some very interesting edits, which amount to a correction of the historical Thomas text tradition. Her criticism is entirely focused on the reliability of the Nag Hammadi text tradition, and not so much on the translations, although, again, she makes some interesting word choices here and there.

Aside from the above, which makes sense if you choose to believe it, and no sense at all if you don't, there is really very little to say about this matter. From a standpoint of the Course, there is really nothing else to it, except that it may be another forgiveness opportunity for some, or simply random noise for others. I would doubt if it is worth anybody's while to really track down word for word where every word choice in Pursah's version occurs in the translated material based on the historical text. Of course, Meyer and Patterson might decide to sue Pursah for plagiarism, and call Bruce MacDonald as an expert witness, who knows.

On yet another level, we might keep in mind that the entire Coptic language, which died out in ca. the 7th century CE, consists of a couple of hundred books, a few dictionaries, and a couple of hundred modern scholars arguing over the fine points. So how easy would it be to come up with yet another original new translation after forty years? Not very, and sameness and hairsplitting differences tend to prevail except for some fancy translations which are highly interpretive. Along those lines, I feel that the Meyer/Paterson translation is about the most neutral version that's out there, in other words, if you weren't consciously trying to be unique and different, you would end up with something along the lines of that translation. The point is to address the content, and that is what Pursah's version does, never mind if you agree with it or not. And again, she states clearly that some of the Logia were pretty much in tact, so a high degree of correspondence with existing translations is to be expected. The crux of her argument is about the whole that emerges with her edits, starting with paring back the collection from 114 to 70/71, and then doing some further edits, some of which are pretty drastic and thought provoking. She is not trying to fix what isn't broken, which is exactly the temptation that exists for translators who have to somehow prove their originality.

Lastly, seen with the Course in mind, the accusation of plagiarism is a classic ego ploy. The ego is a second stringer by definition, for it is the thought: "What if I could play God by myself?" And since projection is the primary defense, it will therefore always accuse everyone else of plagiarism. Somehow magically believing that  this way it will get away with it, that nobody will notice that it is the very ego thought itself which was not original at all. This is merely the archetypical pattern of blaming others for what we secretly accuse ourselves of, and as experience will show us, projection will not solve the problem, but it perversely reinforces the cycle of sin, guilt, and fear, and keeps us in the ego's hell. Once we recognize it for what it is and instead of defending it, we turn it over to the Holy Spirit, it becomes instead a step on the way Home to Heaven, a miracle, that brings us closer to accepting the atonement for ourselves. Conversely, it is a call for Love, and thus another failed attempt to hide the self-accusation of utter un-originality of the ego, and worse, that nothing really happened, that the thought did not even accomplish anything, which is the essence of Salvation, of accepting the atonement for ourselves.



Meanwhile, in other news, as seen this morning in my travels in the Fordham section of the Bronx, I saw on the safety helmet of a construction worker the following summary:

1 cross
3 nails +
----------
4 given

Of course it's up to us if we want to spend our time with the cross and the nails or with the forgiveness.

Quispel, Thomas, Juliana, Westerdam - Coincidences and Synchronicity

Hmm... I received my papers the other day for Gary Renard's Cruise, themed after his new book, due this fall, Love Has Forgotten No One, and suddenly noticed the name of the ship, MS Westerdam. Then I started reading Daniel Schorr's memoirs, and in the second chapter "Going Dutch" he described arriving in the city I grew up in, Rotterdam in 1946 to work for a Dutch press agency, onboard the SS Westerdam, one of the old Holland-America Line steamers.

Meanwhile, I'm writing an article about the Dutch Queen Juliana, and about the palace crisis of 1956, concerning her involvement with the "faith healer" Ms. Greet Hofmans. I'm reading Schorr, as part of my research since he originally wrote on the situation as a reporter for Life, but withdrew the article at the urging of Dutch government figures, except that it was moot anyway, since Henry Luce had already let himself be convinced by route of the Dutch Ambassador (in Italy) not to break the story.

Now Daniel Schorr actually had worked in a press agency in Holland, so he was a natural for this story. However, there is also a connection between Queen Juliana and the Thomas Gospel. Now Gary in turn writes about the Thomas Gospel. And in my opinion at least, it is through his work that the actual meaning of the Thomas Gospel is starting to make some sense to me. Meanwhile it was Queen Juliana who helped Prof. Gilles Quispel in 1955 to gain access to the manuscripts of the Thomas Gospel from Egypt, with the help of the Dutch foreign ministry. Prof. Quispel remained convinced to the end of his days that if it weren't for his intervention, the whole manuscript might have turned to dust in the Coptic Museum in Egypt, in the same suitcase in which it was brought up from Nag Hammadi in 1946. Subsequently, Quispel in turn was a key player in the very first translations of the Thomas Gospel, one of which is still sitting on my bookshelf today.

Not only that, but Quispel knew both Ms. Hofmans, and the Queen quite well, and so they all lived through the 1956 palace crisis, on which Daniel Schorr reported, pursuant to which the Queen was forced to sever contact with Ms. Hofmans, but Quispel maintained the contact to the end of his days. So suddenly a lot of seeming loose ends connected, seemingly with me in the middle. There will be more to this story before this year is out.

Who is Gary Renard Anyway?

Without a doubt, my book Closing the Circle, would not have been written without Gary Renard, and while I've done reviews of his books here, both The Disappearance of the Universe, and Your Immortal Reality, it may just be time for me to talk about the phenomenon Gary Renard. While we're at it, I might as well mention the fact that Gary does have a website, www.garyrenard.com and he is very proud of it; he thought of the name himself, as he will tell you at the drop of a hat.

Well, by now Gary is a bestselling author, whatever that means, and his books have been translated by now into some eighteen languages, which is impressive also. I myself am translating his work into Dutch, which is my native language. Gary was a low energy kid with scoliosis, which was recognized much too late, who liked to study the guitar. At one point in the seventies he took enough time off from drinking beer, to take Werner Erhart's EST training, which for him proved instrumental in getting his music career on track. He did achieve a modicum of success in the Boston area, being that he is from Massachussetts originally. After retiring from his musical career he moved with his then wife, Karen, to Maine, and attempted to survive by speculating on the stock market with too little capital, something which wasn't always as successful as he might have wished apparently. He had also practiced meditation for a long time, and felt that it was helpful to him.

One day in the early nineties he experienced a powerful spiritual awakening, which started when he came out of his morning meditation, and found two people sitting on his living room couch, who seemed to have materialized out of nowhere. A conversation ensued, in which they revealed themselves as ascended masters, named Arten and Pursah in the story. Gary's books really are his account of his meetings with Arten and Pursah. Disappearance (usually abbreviated as DU) covers about a decade, and Your Immortal Reality (YIR) covers September 2003 through December 2005, and a third book, covering his further meetings with his teachers since then, is now due to appear later this year. By the end of the first book, Arten and Pursah reveal to Gary that they have in previous lives been the apostles Thaddeus and Thomas respectively, and further that in fact Gary himself once was incarnated as Thomas, and that in effect Pursah as she appears to him is who he himself will be in his next life, while Arten is who he will marry in his next life, but will also know in this life, where Arten is a woman, who he hasn't met yet at the time of this conversation in DU. Before we get to this point however, Arten and Pursah introduce Gary in their second meeting to A Course in Miracles, a book which Gary had heard of, but did not know, and which they assure him is the teachings of Jesus in modern form, except they refer to him as J, because too many people have negative associations with the name Jesus.

In a way then, the rest of the meetings really revolve around Gary's own learning of A Course in Miracles, but Arten and Pursah also teach him that the meaning of the Course only comes from experiencing for ourselves how our lives change when we practice what it says, as Gary indeed does, on top of which they impart certain experiences to him which further demonstrate the principles of the Course. One important aspect of all this is in fact the holographic nature of our experiential reality of the universe of time and space, without which the very meetings with Arten and Pursah make no sense in the first place. In other words the books themselves, or rather the stories in them, are the demonstration of the very thing they describe, and thus also are they a demonstration of the metaphysics of A Course in Miracles. A central aspect thereof is the notion that "incarnation" is an upside down perception of the actual nature of the experience, which is that the characters in the dream reality which we think is our life, are actually projections of our mind through which we seem to experience our reality, and we all have the capability of remembering various other roles which we played, and in the book Arten and Pursah help Gary to an experience in which he briefly sees thousands of former and future lives of himself. This also demonstrates a second point, namely that within the holographic model of our experiential world, past and future are the same, and equally illusory, no different from choosing right or left when you walk out the front door, or, you choose one movie or another in a multiplex cinema. In short, again, the story of Gary's experiences is itself the demonstration of a very abstract teaching, which thus comes to life, and through empathy as readers with the main character, who is just a bumbling fool like most of us, who has no idea what to do with his life, we come to a whole new level of understanding of ourselves.

Meanwhile, in all simplicity, most people get attracted to reading The Disappearance of the Universe--the title is fascinating in and of itself-- because of the subtitle, which is: Straight talk about Illusions, Past Lives, Religion, Sex, Politics, and the Miracles of Forgiveness. I mean, what more do you want? Meanwhile the connection is made between the original teachings of Jesus in the Thomas Gospel and A Course in Miracles. In the first book 22 Logia of the Thomas gospel are discussed, the ones Pursah suggests are most easily accessible to a modern reader, and in the second book Pursah presents a "kernel" of 70 sayings which she feels are authentic and original teachings of Jesus, and the point is made throughout that there is a consistency of meaning between those teachings and A Course in Miracles. This last idea is the central notion that led me to choose the title for my own book, for through that bridge between the Jesus of the Thomas gospel and the Course, the circle is closed between 2000 years ago and today.

No Christmas in the Thomas Gospel

There is no Christmas in the Thomas gospel, because it only has the teachings, and none of the stories about him, which as a literary form naturally only developed after his death, when his life was being mythologized. The Thomas materials, as much as the hypothetical (but now reconstructed) Q Gospel, which Gary Renard refers to as The Words of the Master, were simply his words, his teachings, with little or no ambiance and storyline, at most some very sketchy situational details, which simply serve as reminders for the practical context in which they occurred. For as he also says in A Course in Miracles, "You have surely begun to realize that this is a very practical course, and one that means exactly what it says." (ACIM:T-8.IX.8:1) This is very crucial to realize, that J presented a very concrete and practical teaching, which just became muddled later, as the stories of others about him began to become more important than what he actually taught. The Course restores that balance, by presenting Jesus's teachings in modern form in an unprecedented way, and Gary Renard's work with its connection to the Thomas gospel lay the bridge to recognizing that very simple and straightforward message again. The only thing to do is to follow him, which means to practice what he taught, more so than to repeat it. The world of course merrily went about repeating it, and for the most part not practicing it, and to the extent it was repeated without understanding, the message got buried under the mythology, though some of that mythology could, if properly understood, be very helpful indeed.

The symbolism of the birth as an inner event, born from the recognition of our true spiritual source, is very powerful. A Course in Miracles, helps us see it in this way, in that the Christ indeed is born to us as and when we choose "another way," in the form of the path for forgiveness, and the implied invitation is that we can turn to him, and he grows within us as we increase in faith in him. Here is how the Course reinterprets the story:

    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.
  When anything seems to you to be a source of fear, when any situation strikes you with terror and makes your body tremble and the cold sweat of fear comes over it, remember it is always for one reason; the ego has perceived it as a symbol of fear, a sign of sin and death. Remember, then, that neither sign nor symbol should be confused with source, for they must stand for something other than themselves. Their meaning cannot lie in them, but must be sought in what they represent. And they may thus mean everything or nothing, according to the truth or falsity of the idea which they reflect. Confronted with such seeming uncertainty of meaning, judge it not.  Remember the holy Presence of the One given to you to be the Source of judgment. Give it to Him to judge for you, and say:

Take this from me and look upon it, judging it for me.
Let me not see it as a sign of sin and death, nor use it for destruction.
Teach me how not to make of it an obstacle to peace, but let You use it for me, to facilitate its coming.
                                                                                                          (ACIM:T-19.IV.C.10-11).  

Seen this way the whole story is that Jesus is a presence for which we need to make place, if only just barely (the manger), for the ego, the world really do not have place for him, but because in the end that is not who we are in truth there always still is a place within us, where he is welcomed. And what he represents is the hope and promise that as we withdraw our investment in the world of duality with all its challenges, of up and down, etc., which offers no hope at all in the end, because it offers only division and darkness, we will remember him, make space for him, and with him, by practicing what he teaches, we will learn to remember who we are in truth, for with him we learn to invest in wholeness, not in division (separation). In the Thomas Gospel he expresses this beautifully in Logion 61:

I am the one who comes from what is whole. I was given from the things of my Father. Therefore, I say that if one is whole, one will be filled with light, but if one is divided, one will be filled with darkness.

Thought Experiment with Thomas

While on the one hand the Thomas gospel is simply an odd collection of sayings of Jesus, and hardly a complete presentation of his teachings, it is important to realize that it is truly the most complete document we have before Jesus was posthumously remolded into a Christian by the diligent efforts of Paul, Peter and the gang. It just turns out that our whole understanding of the situation is so molded by the mythologizing of Christianity that has indoctrinated us all with its version of the facts. In Gary Renard's books his teachers, Arten & Pursah, also point out that the Thomas gospel was not a very complete document, mainly, as Pursah explains, because in her incarnation as Thomas she was ultimately decapitated, and never had the opportunity to add certain thing she might have wanted to add, leaving the book somewhat unfinished.

However because the Thomas sayings predate the canonical gospels, and most particularly Paul whose theological veneer has been applied to all of the New Testament, there is reason to try and focus on the Thomas sayings in isolation, and if you're comfortable with the selection of 70/71 sayings which Pursah presents, as I am, then I would suggest you stick to that, because this selection eliminates numerous ambiguities which otherwise spoil the soup. You have now just eliminated all of the theology of Christianity, and so as a pure thought experiment it is now worthwhile to try to understand what Jesus is saying within just the context of those 70 sayings, for in doing so, you will come as close as you could to hearing him without any addition of extraneous stuff that came later.

As a young man I thought I would get to this point by learning Aramaic, Coptic, etc., until I suddenly knew intuitively that if Jesus was indeed who I deep down knew he was, then also he could bloody well speak to me in my own language, and I should not have to learn some abstruse language to be able to understand him better. The way I look at it today, that was truly the Voice of the Holy Spirit, or Jesus if you will, speaking to me--it was an inspired thought. Since then--having once and for all seen the fallacy--I gave up my efforts at that kind of scholarship, although I'm still happy that I can at least read my New Testament in Greek.

What I would like to suggest here then, as an ongoing thought experiment, is to read the Thomas sayings purely in the context of that collection itself, and stopping yourself as much as possible from pulling in the later Christian theology, and try to add essentially nothing to them. Just let them speak for themselves. By the end of this exercise it will be thoroughly clear to you that Jesus was not a Christian, because very simply Christianity had not been invented yet. So he never had a chance to go to catechism class either, for those had not been invented yet either. This, in my view, is the sort of hidden invitation which the Thomas gospel extends to you, its reader. Try it, you might like it!

Tradition and Textual Criticism

And with many such parables spake he the word unto them, as they were able to hear it. But without parable spake he not unto them: and when they were alone, he expounded all things to his disciples. (Mk 3:33-34)

One of the interesting aspects of the emergence of Pursah's Gospel of Thomas is that it makes us think again of the whole business of textual tradition and textual corruption. One of the fundamental issues with the world's misunderstanding of the teachings of Jesus lies in the problem of reporting. To begin with there is the issue of contemporaneous reporting: there is none.

However, by studying the problems of textual transmission even a little bit, we can definitely begin to intuit a lot about the problems of transmission, particularly if we take into account that before the written stage, there was a period of purely oral transmission. The way Pursah pares back the Thomas Gospel to its bare essence in her version of it is fairly instructive. The contraction of sayings 6 & 14 into one makes immediate intuitive sense if you read them in the Nag Hammadi version and then compare it to the form in Pursah's Gospel of Thomas. Realistically however, we need to understand that there is no authority to say that Pursah's version is authentic as she claims, other than your own inner guidance that could make you feel comfortable with her text. In this regard there is no external authority to validate the apparent facts. Having said that, many of her edits do seem to make immediate intuitive sense.

Another contribution of the Pursah version which makes intuitive sense, lies in the fact that she systematically strips out the "Jesus said" and therefore radically alters the nature of the presentation from story-telling mode, into one of direct address. The text speaks directly to the reader, and therefore through the text Jesus speaks directly to us, in a manner not dissimilar from A Course In Miracles. A lot of Pursah's changes up to that point could be viewed on the basis of the commonly understood issues of oral tradition, similar to the telephone game, where people whisper a story in each others ear, and the last person tells it out loud to the group, at which point the originator shows the original written story which the first person read, and the transition tells you a lot about the changes along the way. Simple experiments like that may cure us of any notion of the reliability of oral tradition. Scriptural corruptions per se are easier to deal with because once you have multiple texts, you can compare, and you can decide which ones are older, which ones have a shorter path of transmission etc., and the more you can reconstruct this, the more you can feel comfortable that it is reasonable to attempt to filter out an original text, an authoritative text, which you can pretty much vouch for at that point. However, there is another dimension, which Pursah implicitly appeals to in her comments.

This other dimension is understanding. Pursah's presentation in DU sets us up to explore that dimension with her comments in that book: that it should be intuitively obvious which of the 114 sayings should be original sayings of Jesus, and which contain evident contradictions. In Your Immortal Reality she subsequently indulges us by actually giving us her version, and she is pretty emphatic that this is how it originally sounded, except that it would have been in Aramaic. In the process, however, she has invited us to get in touch with our own understanding of and intuition about the material. This appeal is a crucially important part of the process, and should also make us do a double take about the issues surrounding oral tradition discussed above.

The very important difference is about "understanding," as alluded to in the quote from Mark with which I opened this comment. The point is that individually Jesus explained everything to his apostles. And so also did the teaching style of the apostles doubtlessly develop with their growing understanding. And they in turn taught from their own understanding, in a manner similar to Jesus, in which they might have reused images, stories and words they heard Jesus say, or they might simply make up their own story, based on the situation they were in, or their own life experience, but focused on transmitting to their interlocutor or their audience, the spirit or meaning, the content of Jesus's teaching. And thus the essential point is that the teaching was about expressing the truth Jesus taught, in a way that the audience could hear. Once we begin to fathom this dimension, it should be readily obvious to us that the whole point is about transmitting meaning, so that many corruptions in form, may not be corruptions at all if they adequately convey the meaning.

To students of the Course this should be obvious, for the miracle is really the instrument of teaching, and we realize that as we learn to choose the miracle, Jesus really is taking us by the hand, and making us understand in the circumstances of our life what his teaching of love means to us, right here, right now, in our own life. The miracle in that sense is the definition of the teaching moment in which Jesus explains "everything" to us when we are alone with him, i.e. when we drop the interpretations of the ego, and listen to the voice of the Holy Spirit instead. Through those experiences we come to understand in the context of our own specific experiences the meaning of what Jesus teaches, then, now, and always. Therefore, the validation of Pursah's proposed "Kernel" of the Thomas Gospel lies only in that inner experience of consistency which altogether speaks for itself. And so, again, the role Pursah plays serves to underscore one of the principal tenets of the Course namely that its purpose is not to become the basis for a new cult or religion, but rather to help some people find their Internal Teacher (ACIM:Preface). Pursah in effect refers us to our Internal Teacher first to validate the soundness of the kernel of the Thomas Gospel which she proposes. Besides inviting us to validate her preferred text in this fashion, she also emphasizes that in understanding it, we should not seek external authority, but learn to become our own ministers and teachers, by letting the Thomas sayings speak to us, and developing our own understanding, as we let the spirit work through us.

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.

Closing the Circle & The GoTh Timeline

Closing the Circle is (going to be) a book about the continuity of the teachings of Jesus, which in turn belies the discontinuity of our world of time and space, which is obfuscated by our seeming experiences of the 'passing of time,' not to mention the illusion of 'development.' The illusory nature of such concepts of reality is exposed head on in the teachings of J, by affirming in so many ways that truth merely is, and does not have to become, and both the Gospel of Thomas (GoTh) and A Course in Miracles(ACIM) are expressions of that truth, which are quite consistent with one another, as is highligted in particular by Pursah's kernel of the Thomas Gospel, as published in Gary Renard's Your Immortal Reality. One of such dubious developments was the repression of the teachings of Jesus, and the blatant replacement of them in the world by Paul's teachings about Jesus, which in order to obliterate all traces of the crime were for good measure named "Christianity," and which in effect were nothing more than the ego's coopting Jesus by producing a g-rated version of him in all respects, and thus to firmly pull him into the world and assign him a role which suited us, and which accordingly could become "popular" as in "popular religion," and "popular culture." One of the items I'd like to consider at the outset is the most probable timeline of GoTh as I see it, and discuss some of its implications. 1) J (30-33 AD) 2) => Q & GoTh (50-60 AD) 3) => Mk (55-65 AD) 4) => Lk & Mt (75 AD) 5) => Jn (90-120 AD) 6) Traditional "Christianity," as formed by the Council of Nicea in 321 AD. The above is a step-wise representation of the funnel of information that led to the formation of the classic notion of a monolithic Christianity, an illusion which even in the official version did not last much longer than to the time of the first split, between the Greek Orthodox and Roman Catholic church, about 300 years later. What we now understand is that the funnel overflowed a few times, and spilled material which did not fit the mold of what Christianity was becoming. Meanwhile the other traditions lived on without the dubious "benefit" of being the Roman state religion which was arrogantly named after Jesus (Christ), and which made Christ special rather than understanding that we are him, and he is who we truly are. The Thomas tradition lived on in India, and in the West it literally went underground for 1600 at Nag Hammadi, but ultimately was rediscovered there in 1945, and from the 50's till now has led to a gradual re-framing of our understanding of those early years of Christian history, and for many of us to a more intimate understanding of Jesus as he speaks to us directly, without many of the later distortions. At the modern end we thus have the rediscovery of the text in 1945, and the gradual emergence of translations, commentary and interpretations into the public awareness in the 60 years since then. In a way this went amazingly slowly, if one realizes that at least in the Anglo-Saxon world it was not until the simultaneous publication in 2003 of Gary Renard's The Disappearance of the Universe, Elaine Pagels' Beyond Belief, and Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code, that active interest in the Thomas Gospel began to dawn on the awareness of main stream audiences. Considering the growing bookshelves of Thomas related literature, it is proving to be fertile territory indeed. I will humbly add my contributions, and through this blog I will discuss some detailed material more in depth which is part of the research for my book. Needless to say, from my perspective Gary Renard's The Disappearance of the Universe and its follow-on book Your Immortal Reality are by far the most interesting of the lot, culminating in Pursah's offering of a kernel of the Thomas Gospel which she represents to be authentic, thus bypassing some of the inevitable historical distortions which are undoubtedly present in the text we found at Nag Hammadi. Moreover the consolidation of Thomas interpretations around A Course In Miracles which Pursah's version implicitly solidifies, provides a clear anchor for the discussion of Thomas which has not existed heretofore and which accounts for the sometimes wildly speculative literature around Thomas. In short, I would argue that the appearance of the Pursah kernel in 2006 consolidates the content of Jesus' teachings in the Thomas tradition in a way which eliminates a lot of corruption of the tradition and gets us back to a coherent whole. If one is stuck however in a Newtonian concept of the world, it would not be possible to give Pursah's version this kind of authentic authority. To many students of the Course however this viewpoint may naturally feel comfortable and "right." I would conclude this introductory comment with the observation that, since Gary quoted my "recap" of revisionist early Christian history in his book, I clearly agree with everything Pursah represents about the history of Thomas' tradition in the overall context, and I gladly accept her endorsement of a position which common sense had already led me to believe was substantially the most reasonable view of the matter. We will come to consider the major different interpretations and dating of Thomas in future postings to this blog.