Docetism revisited after the Course

The other day my reading of The Book of Andrew caused a sort of a flash of recognition of the meaning of docetism post ACIM, simply because the details of the story are a bit at odds with the Gary Renard material, but internally the teaching is very consistent with A Course in Miracles. The form of our experience of Jesus is a function of our mind, the content is the Holy Spirit's... and for that docetism is merely a somewhat dated, overly theological explanation.

In parallel, I was working on the translation of Margot Krikhaar's The Great Liberation, specifically the final part of Chapter 6, where she talks about the meaning of Jesus in the Course in the context of the two levels. Margot discusses the issue very much in line with what Ken Wapnick has said about Helen Schucman's experience in this regard, in Absence from Felicity,his biography of Helen. Ken's favorite expression for this phenomenon is: "Jesus is a What that looks like a who, as long as you think you're a who," or in the words of the Course, Jesus is the manifestation of the Holy Spirit. In terms of our individual experience what this means is that Jesus always seems very familiar, sometimes in surprising ways, but his presence comes with a deep awareness of authenticity and authority, that is beyond question because at some deeper level we recognize our own. Here is what Margot says:

 The ‘paradox’ of the person of Jesus who is so important in the context of a non-dualistic teaching, can newly be explained on the basis of the two levels on which the Course is written. You could say that ‘Jesus’ belongs on level two of the Course—the practical level where the Course meets us in our present experience of ourselves as a person in relationship with other persons. As a result the in and of itself completely abstract love can appear to us as a person. As one who for many in the Western world has become the personification of complete and boundless love: Jesus.

Metaphysically (on level one of the Course) this Jesus is only symbolic. As a ‘person’ he is part of the dream. But as we saw earlier (see paragraph 3.3) in fact everything in the dream is a symbol, and what matters is what the symbol points to, to fear (ego) or love (God). Jesus is a powerful symbol that points directly towards the Love of God. In other words: the form ‘Jesus’ is purely a symbol and not real in and of itself, but the ‘content’ is altogether real. And exactly because of that content is the symbol so powerful and effective.

From a metaphysical point of view, hearing Jesus’ voice means that someone’s mind (like that of Helen Schucman) is able to reach so high that it reaches the very highest levels of consciousness that is possible within the realm of perception. That is the level that lies just below the truth. This level of consciousness therefore is also the highest level of perception, right before it is transformed into knowledge. Knowledge, or Heaven, is not consciousness, but a pure and completely loving ‘being’ or oneness. (Margot Krikhaar, The Great Liberation, Chapter 6.7)

It all boils down to understanding the relationship of content and form, of a non-dualistic reality versus a very dualistic world of perception that we think we live in. The ancient theological struggles over the divinity of Jesus, which rested on such passages as the discussions of the apostles in the Acts of John, about how different their respective experiences of Jesus were (post the resurrection), gave rise to the construct of docetism. Predictably, it was roundly rejected by the church, because it was closer to the truth than the mythology they created about Jesus, as the person who died on the cross, and then experienced a bodily resurrection, in which case he would only have one body and look the same to all. Having said that, the modern explanation based on the metaphysics of the Course contains a way of reconciling both, to a degree which was never before possible. The key insight is the notion that duality is metaphor--everything in this world of appearances is only... an appearance, a perception, and never the truth. Thus the appearance is colored by the mind of the perceiver, as it does not have objective reality of any kind, but the abstract truth that is expressed is the same everywhere regardless of the appearance.

This is how at one point Helen had a dream of Jesus, in which she found that he looked like Bill Thetford. When she expressed her surprise, Jesus responded: "Who else would I look like?" I.e. of course he would appear "somehow familiar" to us. This is the same in the discussion in the Acts of John, he looks different to all of them, but completely familiar and authentic at the same time.
Helen Schucman's Jesus was an ace in advanced statistics, knew his King James Version, was a student of Shakespeare, and for the sake of Bill he also knew the Bhagavadgita very well. He spoke English. After all if Jesus really is who he is, why wouldn't he speak your language? Learning to recognize his voice in whatever form is part of our learning process in the Course in developing our relationship with our own inner teacher.

Through these experiences, and by accepting these differences in form, we learn to tune into content more than form, which is essential to learning to follow the guidance of our own inner teacher, and learning to distinguish his voice from the voice of the ego.

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.

Back to Basics

The other day I posted about the exact issues of how to mentally disentangle the Christian construct of Jesus from the Jesus of the Thomas gospel. This theme is very much in line with my recent discussion of the materials of Stevan Davies, who is a Biblical scholar who has done an incredible job in identifying how the story changed between the Thomas gospel, which dates from the year 50CE, and the later Canonical Gospels, which are dated from ca. 65CE (Mark) onwards. The most significant difference is that in the period 60-65CE, Paul's writings appear on the scene and the influence of his thinking very much sets the tone for the whole New Testament, and so, if you were to put the NT in proper chronological order, the letters of Paul should come first, then Mark, then Matthew and Luke, and then John and Revelation.

If you reordered the books that way, you'd instantly understand why it's such a big difference that the Thomas Gospel was 15 years or so earlier than that: Paul is in between. A simple way of looking at it is that the New Testament reflects the way that Paul said we should look at Jesus. That is a very different thing than the teachings of Jesus proper. The Thomas Gospel has only statements directly attributed to Jesus, and NONE of the interpretations which Paul developed, and which became the basis of Christian theology. Another way of putting it is that Christianity--leaving aside for a moment that there are some 25,000 flavors of it--is merely one interpretation of Jesus, so perhaps more correctly we should speak of one set of interpretations, of him. One way or another Paul looms large in the inception of it, and I think the fair way of interpreting those events is to say that Jesus was a spiritual teacher, and Paul posthumously made a religion out of him. No doubt he had the best intentions, but that does not mean he said the same thing, he interpreted, explained, elaborated, and added on his own concepts.

In order to expand a bit more on some of this basic information, I'm going to do several posts here to discuss some very fundamental stuff that provides the foundation for my book, Closing the Circle--the topic of this blog.

Here is how it all fits together. As I like to point out to people by way of a joke, the first thing to know is, it's not my fault, and the second thing to know is, it's all Gary Renard's fault. So blame him. Complaints in triplicate, press hard, three copies. Without Gary, I would not be in this mess, and I would not have had to write this book. Jokes aside, this is the right sequence of events, but today I want to explain some more details of the chronology.

Whether we are Christians or not, if we grew up in the West, we grew up in a culture dominated by Christianity, and we're all more or less familiar with the chronology, although some of the fine distinctions I'm making about the first 75 years are not generally known, they reflect an insight that has been evolving particularly since the rediscovery of the now famous book collection at Nag Hammadi, Egypt in 1945, which dated back to the time (ca. 365 CE) when the young Church was just making decisions as to what books would make up the New Testament, and some monk had the foresight to bury a collection of books the Church did not like. What we found we owe to the foresight of this monk, and the Thomas gospel was probably the most important part of that find.

Now to explain my own relationship to all of this for a moment, let me say first that I was never a Christian, but for some reason I was interested in the teachings of Jesus. Thanks to a Dutch author, Johan Willem Kaiser, who among other things produced an incredibly insightful translation and commentary of the Gospel of Mark, I had an understanding early on that Jesus and Christianity were two different things, and since thankfully I learned to read Greek, I could at least study some of the original material, and filter out some of the theological coloration which has characterized later translations of the Bible, and via that route I tried to come back to an understanding of the original teaching of Jesus. For me the central issue always seemed to be that he was about spiritual experience, not about theology or morality. In short, Jesus was not a Christian.

The Thomas gospel began to appear in translation in the 1950's and slowly the biblical research came in motion which ultimately led to the almost inevitable conclusion I presented above. It predated the other gospels. Personally I saw Jesus as a spiritual teacher, not too different from Buddha, Krishna, Socrates, Lao Tsu, Sri Ramakrishna and Krishnamurti. Their focus was always on learning truth through personal spiritual experience, including the notion that the truth is within and knowable, if we just learn the mental hygiene not to confuse ourselves all the time with other values and thoughts that have nothing to do with the price of beans. For me the Thomas gospel was never an easy read, much of the research and interpretation I found cumbersome and less than helpful, so for a long time I regarded it as merely an interesting curiosity.

For me something changed when I discovered A Course in Miracles in 1991. First of all this book (usually abbreviated ACIM), which was channeled in the late 60's by a Dr. Helen Schucman, who was a Professor of Medical Psychology at Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center in NY, and published in 1975, is attributed to Jesus. And the way he comes across in its pages is exactly that, as a spiritual teacher, with a focus on the experience of truth, not on theology. The book is very profound, highly integrated, and incorporates really a unique amalgam of Western and Eastern thought, including everything from Plato, the Bible, Shakespeare, and some of the premises of Freudian psychoanalysis not to mention some of the therapeutic orientation of Carl Rogers. That list could easily be expanded further. The bottom line is, for me it was intuitively clear that the intelligence speaking to me through the pages of ACIM was Jesus as I sensed he taught originally and for all time. The teacher of Truth. Not a teacher of Christian theology. Just Truth with a capital T. I had studied the Course for 12 years before Gary Renard appeared on the scene, but then the magic started...

In 2003, three books appeared, with the same publication date, Dan Brown's The DaVinci Code, Elaine Pagels' Beyond Belief, and Gary Renard's The Disappearance of the Universe. In short, indirectly the Thomas Gospel was in the air, for all three touch on it. The first two were more in the main stream, and they awakened an interest in the Thomas gospel and related materials, Gary's book however was a surprise hit in its own right. He had never been published before, and he was with a very small publisher, and yet before you knew it, he sold 100,000 copies, and the book was acquired by Hay House. It was in Gary's book that the connection was made between the original teachings of Jesus in the Thomas Gospel, and ACIM, and it was in his second book, Your Immortal Reality, (2006), that one of his teachers, Pursah presented her kernel of the Thomas Gospel of just 70 sayings of Jesus (compared to the 114 of the Nag Hammadi text), which she says really sounded like Jesus. Her selection makes a lot of sense, so for me at the moment, I'm totally focused on that collection of 70 sayings from Thomas as being the least suspect kernel of his original teachings, but they are still fragmentary. Thus the greater context for me is provided by A Course in Miracles.

In my next few posts I will talk a bit more about the characters involved, to make the foundation of my work on the Thomas Gospel even clearer.

MLK Day and Building A Monument

Tonight I had the chance to attend Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem, where there was an event for MLK day, including a fundraiser for the new MLK monument in Washington. And there was a beautiful concert by the choirs of this church and another church from Queens, as well as performers from yet two other churches. It all brought back deep and moving memories of the profound connection I always felt with MLK since I was 11 or 12 years old, and read all of his books that were available in Dutch. It was he who led me first to Ghandi, and ultimately to become a conscientious objector, when I reached draft age in my native Holland. The truly heartwarming spirit of this service really swept me off my feet, and the occasion made it even more meaningful.

For me it also brought up the image of Dr. Helen Schucman--the scribe of A Course in Miracles--who, as a little girl, maybe at the same age as when I was studying MLK, went to baptist services with her family's maid, who was from Harlem. She kept a life-long fascination with churches, though she was ultimately to understand that Jesus's "church" was not a building, or an organization, but the loving dedication in human relationships which is the extension of his Love. More and more one realizes that it really does not matter how people find their way, or what their theologies and beliefs are. Whatever works for you is fine, and we all learn in different ways. The warmth and intensity of this gathering certainly spoke volumes, and if for me A Course in Miracles just happens to be the way, and I am not about to join a church, I can still enjoy the beautiful music, the atmosphere and relish the friendship, for that's really the only thing that means anything. The lady who invited me was the cousin of a former work colleague, and by the time it was all over and we walked to the bus, it was as if we had known each other for a lifetime, and she's regaling me with memories: "Now, child, you should'a been there when..."

And, judging by the success of the collection, that monument is going to get there, and at a very symbolic time in the history of this country.

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)

Absence from Felicity

Here is another book that was mentioned in Closing the Circle, and I have sofar not discussed in full on this site. I doubt anyone would read this book unless they were already interested in the Course, and for as much it is a biography, it is really about the Course which would seem to have been the defining event of Helen Schucman's life and work. Actually, the publishers of A Course in Miracles, the Foundation for Inner Peace, have a lot of material now available on-line on their recent new website, and one important audio segment is Helen's discussion of the Voice, which would make it clear to any one why Helen's years with the Course were to her the defining experience of her life.

This biography is very much in depth, and it could only conceivably be written by one who understood Helen and the Course very deeply, not to mention someone who would have to be an accomplished psychologist himself to be able to write this. Since helping Helen with preparing the Course for print, Ken Wapnick has simply become the pre-eminent teacher of the Course, and this book reflects all of that experience, and it exhaustively addresses the need of the Course student who at some point becomes interested in the context in which the Course arose. The essence of the story is simply that besides all of the evident (with the benefit of hindsight) seeds that were present in the lives of Helen and Bill, the fundamental point is that they were in a professional situation that was rife with conflict, jealousies, including a fair amount of tension between the two of them. Professionally Bill was a professor of Medical Psychology at Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center, and Helen was a Research Professor under him, and they had their offices in the Black building at West 168th Street in Manhattan. So they were in New York, the Empire City, highly symbolic of all the world has to offer, good and bad. And one day they found themselves completely fed up with the professional tensions they had to deal with, and prior to going to a meeting at another facility, Bill voiced this to Helen in the now famous "another way" speech, in which he simply expressed to her that there had to be another way of relating to people and much to her own surprise, never mind his, Helen spontaneously agreed to help him find it. It was not too long after that that the Course started making itself manifest to Helen's mind. The rest is history, as they say.

This book will undoubtedly satisfy any student wanting to gain a deeper understanding of the birth place and process of the Course, and it is fascinating to see how Helen's entire life prepared her for this experience, starting from the fact that she had a long standing and early attraction to Jesus and the Bible. I can almost see her as a young child going to service at a Baptist church with the family's black maid, and all the other ways in which she explored her relationship with Jesus during her life. If there is any story that is my favorite in this book, there is the dream in which she experiences a man who helps her and intuits that this is Jesus, and later when awake asks Jesus, how come he looked like Bill, and the answer is, "Who else would I look like?" In a way this is the essence of the Course, namely it ALL happens in relationships, and depending on whether we see our brothers with the ego or the Holy Spirit, our experience of them will change accordingly, until we truly understand that they are always our best way home, and we learn to recognize our savior in them, and as the Course puts it, learn to "see the face of Christ" in them, which comes only from practicing forgiveness, until we finally have no need any longer to project any guilt onto our brothers.

Also helpful is the fact that through Helen's own experiences we can see all the mistakes we ourselves tend to make in our relationship with Jesus and/or the Holy Spirit, such as trying to use them as Santa Claus, as in Helen's episodes with Jesus's Higher Shopping service, where she felt he helped her find the green panty hose she liked best, or conversely she experienced that if she was on the outs with him, she could not find anything at all. To a greater or lesser degree we've all known such episodes. If you lose something in your house, the chances of finding it are slim to none if you give in to the upset, whereas if your mind is at peace it'll just turn up when you need it. All of these episodes help to underscore the very practical meaning of the Course. Meanwhile Helen's own life also shows us why the Course's primary focus always is on seeing the ego with open eyes, and understanding honestly that it is our own resistance that prevents us from following the Course completely right away. It is a process, and this book can certainly be helpful to many.

Lastly, this book is important for the historical record, now that there are so many bootleg versions of the Course on the market, which are being promoted by unscrupulous individuals, who are achieving little but to obfuscate the message with controversy about the text of the Course itself. No author would appreciate it if the early drafts of their work were made public, and that certainly applies here. The fact that the copyright on the first edition of the Course was invalidated for technical/legal reasons has little relevance either. Once you understand the publication process of the Course, it should be clear to anyone that you always want to work with the current 3rd edition from the Foundation for Inner Peace (www.acim.org), which is the original publisher, established in conjunction with Helen and Bill, and completely faithful to their intentions. The 3rd edition includes the pamphlets that came later, The Song of Prayer, and the psychotherapy pamphlet.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Rose by Any Other Name: J, Jesus, Jeshua, Yeshua?

Are the names truly all the same? Yes and no.

Gary Renard's teachers tell him in The Disappearance of the Universe, to use the name J instead of Jesus, in order to avoid confusion with the Jesus of Christianity, both in the positive sense of Christians who see Jesus in the Pauline mold, or for Jewish people who may have negative associations with that name. All of that makes sense, and Gary's usage of J certainly works for his books. Notice also that in Pursah's version of the Thomas gospel, she uses "J said"  instead of "Jesus said." It gets downright funny when he speaks of the "J Underground" as a name for the movement that is not a movement, but simply a practical collective term for those who are learning the thought system of the Holy Spirit as the Course expresses it. Reviewing and teaching those concepts in the terms of day to day living is the essence of Gary's books. 

Jesus is the latinized version of the Hebrew name Yeshua, or Yoshua, meaning God Helps, God Saves, etc. so it is a very symbolic name, as indeed many names from that tradition were. That meaning is also in line with the notion of Jesus as the manifestation of the Holy Spirit, as he presents himself in the Course, as follows:

Jesus is the manifestation of the Holy Spirit, Whom he called down upon the earth after he ascended into Heaven, or became completely identified with the Christ, the Son of God as He created Him. The Holy Spirit, being a creation of the one Creator, creating with Him and in His likeness or spirit, is eternal and has never changed. He was "called down upon the earth" in the sense that it was now possible to accept Him and to hear His Voice. His is the Voice for God, and has therefore taken form. This form is not His reality, which God alone knows along with Christ, His real Son, Who is part of Him. (ACIM:C-6.1)

and here, speaking in the first person:

I am the manifestation of the Holy Spirit, and when you see me it will be because you have invited Him. For He will send you His witnesses if you will but look upon them. Remember always that you see what you seek, for what you seek you will find. The ego finds what it seeks, and only that. It does not find love, for that is not what it is seeking. Yet seeking and finding are the same, and if you seek for two goals you will find them, but you will recognize neither. You will think they are the same because you want both of them. The mind always strives for integration, and if it is split and wants to keep the split, it will still believe it has one goal by making it seem to be one. (ACIM:T-12.VII.6)

One of my favorite ways of expressing this whole idea comes from Ken Wapnick, who says it as follows: "Jesus is a What, who looks like a who, as long as you think you're a who." By this time we the clearly have a concept of Jesus that is more "docetic,"  as it has been called in Christian theology, to describe a concept in the early literature which was dismissed by the church, which clearly implied that Jesus could appear differently to different people, as reported in the Acts of John, and an experience which Helen Schucman, the scribe of the Course, also had when she once dreamed and encountered a male figure who to her feeling clearly was Jesus, but who looked like Bill (Thetford), her boss at work, and her collaborator with the recording of the Course. When she queried Jesus on the issue of how come he " looked like Bill," the answer she got was: "Who else would I look like?"  as reported in Ken Wapnick's Absence from Felicity.

While I think that all of these considerations are valid, some people will have more of a problem with Jesus than others, and I've certainly had my share of them. At the moment my preferences would probably be J or Yeshua, or Jeshua, but Jesus is OK too. Studying the Course simply forces you to come to grips with the fact that he presents himself differently there then what you may be used to from Christianity, but clearly he's not to hung up on what you call him either, maintaining only that he can help us more if we do believe in him.

So in the end, it boils down to suit yourself, whatever name makes you most comfortable, it could even be Buddha, or Quan Yin, Krishna, or anything else that represents that symbol of total and unconditional love to you.

The Better Angels of our Nature

Surely those words are a very lovely way to refer to the Voice of Reason within. Abraham Lincoln said that, in fact he appealed to this notion in his inaugural speech in 1861, hoping to appeal to the things that united people, instead of dividing them, and I want to quote those lines here in full:

We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battle-field, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature. (Abraham Lincoln, First Inaugural Address, March 4th, 1861)

Evidently, his appeal to higher reason did not bear fruit, but his language was surely inspired and inspiring!

And so people at different times have come up with different words, for a phenomenon that most of us know, and will recognize for what it is, regardless of the name we give it. Names in the Course such as the Voice for God, or Jesus, Holy Spirit, Reason, all are ways to highlight that unspeakable clarity of total absence of any ambiguity, which characterizes the endless rattle of the ego. What it is not is the "speaking in tongues" as it is commonly understood. It is a fully conscious inner clarity which can at times have the dimensions of a voice, but at many times it can be more subtle, as in hearing a thought, more so than hearing a voice, or it can jump out at us from other sources which seem to be within earshot or line of sight quite accidentally. But we know it by the crystalline clarity that sets it off from the humdrum muddle of the ego's traffic in presumed thought.

We often forget we have these experiences, and deny that we have them, just like Helen Schucman complained at times that nothing ever happened in her life (see Ken Wapnick's Absence from Felicity).

The Course puts it all in the framework of Jesus, because it is a great children's tale, and it is comfortable within the cultural framework we live in. As a very young child (circa age 4), I was introduced to him by one Miss Hofmans, who without any doubt channeled him. Much like the Course sees Jesus as the Manifestation of the Holy Spirit, so she would mostly speak of God's Help, with the clarification that he was not like Santa Claus, bringing me what I want, but that the deal with him was to let the Help take whatever form was best for me. Later there were others who helped me in various ways in my relationship with him, which was always an attraction, but never easy. 

In my early twenties I went through a period of intense study, and became fascinated by everything I thought could help me sorting Jesus out from the theological mess that surrounded him. Since at that time I was reading fluent in both Hebrew and Greek, I thought at times that perhaps I should also learn Coptic (for the Thomas Gospel), or Aramaic, because of the many Aramaicisms in New Testament Greek. Somehow I had a growing sense of absurdity about the whole endeavor, and there came a time when I was totally crystal clear that Jesus was perfectly well able to communicate with me in language I could understand right now, and I'm quite clear in retrospect that it was that inspiration which ultimately would lead me to A Course In Miracles, which is in plain English, and one hell of a lot easier than Greek, Aramaic, and Coptic, and not only that, but to top it off, then came along Gary Renard, who gives the whole thing one more time but now in the vernacular, so it reads as easy as the latest thriller. It seems to be only through those sorts of experiences that we gradually learn to trust the Inner Teacher, who is present in all of us, but is just denied and repressed most of the time, as we indulge the shenanigans of our ego. The Thomas gospel, the subject of this site, certainly is one wonderful way of rejoining the original freshness of that voice, and knowing ourselves spoken to directly by him, as if we were there.

On lower Broadway in NYC,opposite #100, there is an inscription in the sidewalk close to Trinity church, commemorating a visit of Queen Juliana of the Netherlands, in 1952, as there are of many other dignitaries who visited New York. Juliana's visit at the time was a beacon of hope to some, but not fondly remembered by others, including her friend Eleanor Roosevelt, not to mention her own husband Prins Bernhard, who entertained different sympathies than she did. She was a deeply spiritual person, who also knew the same Miss Hofmans who I referred to above, and turned to her for advice frequently, to the increasing dismay of Prins Bernhard. At this particular time Juliana was increasingly concerned that the emergence of the cold war, promoted through the Nato alliance, was not a sure preventative of World War III, but rather a disastrous polarization, that might practically ensure the arrival of a Third World War. Some people guessed that her sympathies lay with a movement called the Third Way, which sought an alternative to defuse the building crisis. But it was too much a political movement to suit the Queen. Also, the Third Way may not have been a practical solution. Politically there was a fear that time that it might appear that the Queen went too far in some of her speeches, in effect front-running the political process, which was a no no, considering her position as a constitutional monarch. Clearly the Queen's focus was on the spiritual need for inner peace as a basis of any efforts towards peace in the world. Today. we can look back on the insanity of the Cold War years, including the disastrous attack plans of General Curtis LeMay, as well as the narrow escapes we had, such as the incident with Lt. Colonel Stanislav Yevgrafovich Petrov, the Soviet airforce officer who narrowly avoided nuclear holocaust, in a long string of close calls during that period.


Clearly Juliana's inspiration was to try to find a way out of conflict, and she was quite far-sighted in her concerns, different from her husband, who was illegally on the take from Lockheed at various times, and did not care for her position at all. The Queen framed the issue primarily as a spiritual one. There was at the time even a political movement called the Third Way that sought an alternative to the cold war polarization of the world, but may have been naïve to the same extent Lincoln was proven by events to have been naïve, if you will, by appealing to those 'better angels.' But Julianas approach was more a spiritual one, emphasizing inner peace, and the failure of any real world peace does not mean that the attempt, the consideration, was not an extremely valuable one, and one that reflected an inner choice, and a willingness to look for a way out of conflict. Lincoln got a civil war, and Juliana found herself spurned in her spiritual interests by her friend Eleanor Roosevelt, as well as back home, because she was ahead of the political process, which technically she could not and should not be. Eventually the whole thing erupted in a palace crisis in 1956, in which her connection to Ms. Hofmans was ridiculously played up as the source of the problems, allowing a face saving way out for Bernhard and the Dutch political system, at the expense of the integrity and credibility of Juliana. So Lincoln got himself a civil war, Juliana got herself a palace crisis, but some 15 years later Helen Schucman and Bill Thetford were also looking for a way out of conflict, "There must be another way," pursuant to which Helen found the inner voice of A Course In Miracles, and gave the world a realistic way out of the ego's perpetual war, which has never given us perpetual peace, because indeed it is a way to preserve war, conflict, murder, and sin, symbolized in the world's unending fratricide. (The story of Helen and Bill can be found in her biography, Absence from Felicity, and Gore Vidal brilliantly exposed the fallacy of Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace in his book of that name). We might also note here that for Gary Renard, his inspiration for his spiritual experiences which led him to A Course In Miracles, and which gave the world his wonderful books, also was finding a way out of conflict in his life, as he clearly describes in the first Chapter of The Disappearance of the Universe.

J, or Yeshua, the Jesus as he presents himself in the Course, in a way then demonstrated that what matters is only the little willingness to make that other choice, to know that the conflict of the world is not our home, and to point the way out. In following him we learn to "Teach only love" (ACIM:T-6.III.2:4), by in effect leaving the world to stew in its own juices, and to learn that destruction in form is not what matters, but our presence in spirit is. That is what he gave us and gives us, and those who listen will know and understand that the crucifixion was meaningless, for He (The Holy Spirit) cannot be destroyed, as His manifestation is not who he is, just like peace on earth can never be as long as we keep investing in conflict, and J's teachings are the way out.

Spoken Miracles

Visitors to the Yahoo! group on The Disappearance of the Universe will recognize the name of Martha Lucía Espinosa immediately, and know that there was a discussion on the forum about her plans for this upcoming book, which is based on a hint that was contained in DU, namely that the 365 Course quotes contained in that book provide a complete summary of the Course's teachings, which one could use for daily meditations etc. Because of her editorial choice to present these "quotes" as a "sayings collection," I felt a discussion of the book was in order here. Those of us who have really worked with Gary's books are in no doubt that they are inspired material, for they speak to us on so many levels all at once, and they clearly represent yet another dimension to facilitate our learning of the Course, by re-casting it in the framework of Gary's conversations with his friends, the ascended masters Arten and Pursah. Gary's experiences with Arten and Pursah, and with learning the Course, on one level are nothing but a dramatization of our own learning opportunities with the Course, inviting us to empathize, and identify with Gary as Course student par excellence, as he goes through his own slapstick routines of Course learning. Clearly, in preparing this little book Lucía has discovered yet another dimension in which this material operates, which she reflects in her choice of title. Not only was the Course spoken to Helen Schucman, the 365 quotes from the Course were again spoken through Gary's books during his conversations with Arten & Pursah. And Lucía heard the spoken quality in those quotes, in particular also because of the context of the Thomas Gospel  which permeates Gary's work, in as much as his own discovery of having been Thomas in a prior life, as well as Pursah representing the recollection of that lifetime, which is obviously central to the book. Throughout Gary's books the focus is on what "J" really did say, 2000 years ago as recorded by Thomas, and today in the form of ACIM, and to clear away the clutter of subsequent interpretation and distortion, and to get back to what the words were meant to say as they were spoken by the speaker. The Thomas Gospel is fast becoming the symbol of hearing the authentic teaching of Jesus, before the distortions of it began to accumulate in the narrative Gospel tradition which came later, and which was never again to get out from under the heavy editorial influence of Paul, whose first letters are contemporaneous with the Gospel according to Mark, which in and of itself has perhaps the least amount of Pauline influence, but nevertheless already shows some of the influences that were to distort the teachings of the living Jesus into the dead body of Christian dogma (eucharist etc.). Pursah's kernel of the 70 authentic sayings in the Thomas Gospel help us find the "historical" Jesus in pure form, free of the materials that were added on later. In Spoken Miracles, Lucía hears a kernel of the Course, almost as a sayings tradition, which can speak to us in a very direct way as a refresher of the Course - though it could also be an introduction to the Course. The book represents Pursah's Cliff-notes for A Course In Miracles, and as such it is a wonderful way to straighten us out, if we get wrapped around the axle with the ego's complications again. Lucía's own introduction is fascinating, and may serve to make the material accessible to many seekers. No doubt few might have wandered as widely and at such a young age as Lucía has, starting with studying a form of Gnosticism at age 13, but as she meandered through various spiritual and religious traditions, she touches seemingly on anything that is around in the contemporary landscape, including a brush with the dogmatic certainty of fundamentalist judgment and the Leave Behind series, to which Gary also offers some choice comments in the course of his books. The Course itself emphasizes in the first entry of the Manual for Teachers, that God's Teachers come from anywhere and everywhere, from any religion or no religion, and in that spirit Lucía's wide ranging explorations will offer many readers the opportunity to recognize themselves in her, and thus to hear again the still small voice inside, which leads us to truth in the end. Reading the book is a mind-blowing experience, for even if we already realized the rich crystalline structure of the Course, until Gary came along, most of us would have thought a popular introduction to the Course was an impossibility, and a meaningful summarization equally an impossible task, except that it turns out that DU, like a Russian doll, contained this supposedly impossible summarization. It just took Lucía's faithful scribal work to free it up from its rough shape and to polish the diamond. This resulting little gem of a book truly astound us with the brilliance of the Course on yet another level, as impossible as that seems. I've studied the Course for too long to venture a guess how this book would strike someone who came to it without a knowledge from the Course, it seems to me that very much like the sayings of Thomas it would evoke a hunger to know and understand more of the thought system that was being implied more than explained in them, in which case it could lead people to the Course. As a refresher for long standing Course students, it is definitely... well... if I may say so: refreshing! It could be used as the thoughts for the day for a year long refresher program, or also simply read, or you could dabble in it. Last, not least, this book is also a great buy at $9.95, and in a way it provides a more portable Course than the portable Course - the small format edition of the Course from the original publishers, which is still more luggable than portable. So for a weekend trip take this one along if you are traveling light!  And I supect that just like The Disappearance of the Universe itself serves as an introduction to the Course for many people, this little book too may become a first invitation to the Course for a great many people - kind of a no risk trial.

---