Kuan Yin stops by

Last year somehow Ti Kuan Yin Tea from Prince of Peace became my favorite tea, and then, in the fall, a Chinese student showed up for my Sunday afternoon Course group at St. Helena's church. She had just emigrated from China and was studying English at Columbia University. She had inquired from the university if they taught classes in A Course In Miracles, based on the ostensible logic that Helen and Bill had been professors at Columbia-Presbyterian, but evidently, much to her surprise, the Columbia did not. Eventually, she found my class in the Bronx, which suited her schedule.

About nine months before I met her, in the fall of 2016, she had started studying the Course in Chinese, and she came equipped with a Chinese and an English version of the Course. Early on, she stumbled across some difficulty with the translation, which all boiled down to a matter of content over form, of translating the meaning versus translating the words.

Fortunately, I was able to ask Chiao Lin Cabanne, the Chinese translator, and it turned out her response was exactly what I expected:

Dear Rogier

Ha! ha!  I can guarantee that my Chinese translation means exactly as you explained.

After years' experiments, the Foundation decided not to take "literal translation" approach. Many Chinese who doesn't have Chinese literary training expect the Chinese Course should be word-by-word exactly the same as the English sentence structure.

I usually don't respond to those questions. I know that their problem is not about the " words" but something else. l just encourage new students to follow whatever interpretation they feel comfortable with.

We have educational websites if she wants to know more.

http://www.acimtaiwan.info/

Chiao Lin

The student proved to be a quick learner and here was her response:

Thank you for your email ! And thanks for asking Chiao Lin !

When I read the text book again . 

           2 Nothing real can be threatened.

3 Nothing unreal exists.

4 Herein lies the peace of God.

And it's Chinese translation:

凡是真实的，不受任何威胁 ；

凡是不真实的，根本不存在。

上主的平安即在其中。

I love the Chinese translation. I am also have a strong feeling to regard the word  "herein" as the Chinese word  "当下＂

Thanks

 So, for a few months, we ended up doing ACIM classes combined with ESL for Chinese. The student always asked lots of questions, and we joked about it a lot because her one question would end up being ten. Somehow we stumbled upon Kuan Yin along the way, and I basically said that Kuan Yin in Western terms should probably be understood as either Jesus or Mary, the symbol of Compassion, and Love.

Before Christmas time we ended up reading the introduction to the Workbook. We had been talking about the idea that there is only one Mind, and one Holy Spirit, and one ego, but that we could each hear the Holy Spirit according to the conditioning of our hearing, be it in English or Chinese. Next, we stumbled upon these lines:

The only general rules to be observed throughout, then, are: First, that the exercises be practiced with great specificity, as will be indicated. 2 This will help you to generalize the ideas involved to every situation in which you find yourself, and to everyone and everything in it. 3 Second, be sure that you do not decide for yourself that there are some people, situations or things to which the ideas are inapplicable. 4 This will interfere with transfer of training. 5 The very nature of true perception is that it has no limits. 6 It is the opposite of the way you see now. (ACIM:W-in:6)

 And I saw her stumble over line three. She said, I have a question, and I found myself silently praying to have a simple answer so we would not stumble over translation problems, and what occurred to me was simply this: that the whole is 100% and that 99% is not 100%. Next, she said: maybe my question is not a question, but a statement: "It's like 99% is not 100%, only 100% is 100%." I shared with her that I had been thinking of it in the exact same terms, which was almost a live demonstration of what we had been discussing earlier, that the Holy Spirit speaks to each of us in our own language.

She recently came to visit for my birthday, and that's when she told me that at that time, she had had a strong experience of Kuan Yin being in the room with us during that exchange. This brought back to me that Kuan Yin was an important figure for me for a long time, because one of my early teachers (from ca age 15 to age 40), always had a little Kuan Yin statue on a chest of drawers in the living room of his apartment in Amsterdam. Finally, today, I suddenly realised that most of the last year I had been drinking Ti Kuan Yin, and it had become my favorite tea.

I've been reading a lot on Kuan Yin again, lately. I found this site, which offers some wonderful and concise information about Kuan Yin (She who hears the cries of the world), and it is very worth reading. It is fascinating to see how the Buddha Avalokiteshvara morphed into Kuan Yin in China and became an enduring symbol of compassion the world over. Clearly, for many, a female figure is often easier to relate to than a male so often times Kuan Yin is to Buddha or Avalokiteshvara as Mary or Mary Magdalen were to Jesus, symbols all of the Love of God, simply in whatever form is easiest to relate to, reflecting that basic teaching of the Course that the Holy Spirit will speak to us in whatever form is most readily acceptable to us.

The Greatest Cop-out in the World

The Devil made me do it.
God made me do it.
I was guided to do it.
In hoc signo vinces. (In this sign you will conquer)
Ich hab' es nicht gewusst. (I didn't know it.)
I was just following orders.

To which my answer always is that my mother was always certain that she was channeling the Lord Almighty directly when she was telling me to eat my spinach. The ego has more ways of recruiting God to its cause than you can shake a stick at. But these are the dynamics of guilt, manipulation and intimidation.

The Devil made me do it, is the easiest cop-out in the world, and it is in fact a way of objectivizing the ego thought of separation into an external force, personalized as the Devil, which can make me do anything at all. This is entirely part of the paranoid-schizophrenic mode of operating which is the basis of all ego psychology. It projects the cause for my behavior outside of me, so that I have somebody else to blame for my actions. As Ken Wapnick always says, the first scream of a child really means: "I didn't do it!" It's my parents' fault, they made love and caused me to get born. So from day one we set it up so we appear to be the guiltless victim of the world, no wonder then that we use such a principle in our defense whenever convenient.

God made me do it. This one is the same thing in reverse. This time it is about something that has some social merit, for which I like to claim credit, but I show my magnanimity by praising God, and staying on his good side in the process. I also give myself more authority in the process.

I was guided to do it. The answer to that one is in Ken Wapnick's repeated saying that we're always channeling someone, either the ego or the Holy Spirit. And the rest of it is: you'll only know which by seeing how peaceful you are. By the same token, mentioning to your interlocutor that you "feel guided" is only a subtle intimidation attempt, like my mother about the spinach, by appealing to a higher authority, which is supposed to impress them. It's guilt and manipulation at work.

In hoc signo vinces. That was the famous message which the Emperor Constantine saw in his dream, frequently cited by Christians as a symbol of the success of Christianity, when it was of course only the complete inversion of the teachings of Jesus.

Ich hab' es nicht gewusst. That is the famous pleading of the Nazi war criminals at Neurenberg, and it is the perfect corollary to every form of accusing some cause outside of us, and taking no responsibility personally. It is countered by the well understood principle that ignorance of the law is no excuse. It goes hand in hand with the next one.

I was just following orders. Even under military law a soldier remains responsible if his orders are a violation of the law. The same goes in the corporate world. Nice try, but try telling it to the judge. The problem is the same: "To thine own self be true!" The question is which self?

The bottom line is these are all different forms of the same basic cop-out, and we are responsible for our actions, and more importantly for our thoughts, which lead to the actions.

God, as he is seen in the Course, as our Source, like also Jesus' teachings say in their original form, is only our loving Father, who created us as spirit, as the extension of his oneness, still always part of him. We then dreamed up a world and a body as the expression of the ego thought of separation, an imaginary dream life outside of the Oneness of Heaven. Then we make up a God who we accuse of making the world, so again we're off the hook. And we have him throw us out of paradise, making him the heavy in that story too. All of this serves the purpose of escaping responsibility for our thoughts, and covering over the power of our mind. The teachings of the Kingdom as something that is within us, and everywhere around us, except we don't see it, is exactly about that power of the mind, and responsibility for our thoughts, as is the notion of the faith that moves mountains. Our belief in the world of time and space is only the reflection of our belief in separation, and when that belief is healed completely there is no world. Only our belief in the separation upholds it.

There is no world apart from what you wish, and herein lies your ultimate release. Change but your mind on what you want to see, and all the world must change accordingly. Ideas leave not their source. This central theme is often stated in the text, and must be borne in mind if you would understand the lesson for today. It is not pride which tells you that you made the world you see, and that it changes as you change your mind.
But it is pride that argues you have come into a world quite separate from yourself, impervious to what you think, and quite apart from what you chance to think it is. There is no world! This is the central thought the course attempts to teach. Not everyone is ready to accept it, and each one must go as far as he can let himself be led along the road to truth. He will return and go still farther, or perhaps step back a while and then return again. (ACIM:W-132.5-6)

Seen from this point of view, taking responsibility for our mind includes taking responsibility for the world we chose to see, chose to see by our belief in the ego thought system where we believe ourselves to be separate from God. And so we see a world of murder and mayhem, because we believe in a thought system of murder, of separation from our Source. The correction is the thought system of the Holy Spirit, and Jesus' teaching of forgiveness is the bridge from one to the other.

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.

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.

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!

Closing the Circle, Squared

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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