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.

ACIMExplained Interview by Ken Bok

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





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

Meanwhile you can order the book here:


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

The Jefferson Bible - Facsimile Edition

I've blogged here before about the Jefferson Bible, and of course I dealt with it extensively in my book, Closing the Circle. My earlier blog on the Jefferson Bible referred to a specific edition of it, that edited by Forrest Church which I think is more or less the standard at this moment.

Now, however, the Smithsonian is publishing a facsimile edition of Jefferson's original, which will be quite interesting to see.

At the same time, it makes me wonder if it was this re-publication of the original which actually might have been alluded to in Gary Renard's narrative in The Disappearance of the Universe, on pages 218-219. That was written and published at a time when the Jefferson Bible one one edition or another had been continuously available, and yet it refers to its not being available with the following somewhat befuddling statement: "Of course he [Jefferson] couldn't make it available to the public at that time without being accused of terrible things, but it will be made available soon for those who want to see it."

It is particularly the phrase "want to see it" which intrigues me - because again the text has been continuously available, but seeing a facsimile of Jefferson's actual, manual product is something else altogether. The reason I have any inkling is because in the Forrest Church edition of the "Jefferson Bible" there are three facsimile pages from the original, and you can't help but visualize Jefferson at his desk, communing with Jesus as best he understood him, and with scissors and glue pasting together, guided by intuition and common sense, that which he considered to be authentic and lopping off all the circumstantial stuff which he considered ballast. It is a completely fascinating image.

The image is all the more intriguing because it is a prototype of the process we all go through at some point in time if we turn inside and try to understand what it is Jesus teaches, and make at least a start with developing our own relationship with him. In the process we have to liberate him out of the dustbin of history, and forgive him, as he alludes to in several places in the Course, for not being the idol that we have made of him. To the ego, Jesus is terribly offensive, which is an entirely reasonable position, because Jesus pulls the rug out from under the ego thought system. Hence it is necessary, if we want to turn to him with an open mind, to first forgive him for not being any of the things we are prejudiced to think he is.

I am made welcome in the state of grace, which means you have at last forgiven me. For I became the symbol of your sin, and so I had to die instead of you. To the ego sin means death, and so atonement is achieved through murder. Salvation is looked upon as a way by which the Son of God was killed instead of you. Yet would I offer you my body, you whom I love, knowing its littleness? Or would I teach that bodies cannot keep us apart? Mine was of no greater value than yours; no better means for communication of salvation, but not its Source. No one can die for anyone, and death does not atone for sin. But you can live to show it is not real. The body does appear to be the symbol of sin while you believe that it can get you what you want. While you believe that it can give you pleasure, you will also believe that it can bring you pain. To think you could be satisfied and happy with so little is to hurt yourself, and to limit the happiness that you would have calls upon pain to fill your meager store and make your life complete. This is completion as the ego sees it. For guilt creeps in where happiness has been removed, and substitutes for it. Communion is another kind of completion, which goes beyond guilt, because it goes beyond the body. (ACIM:T-19.IV.A.17)

and

Is he the Christ? O yes, along with you. His little life on earth was not enough to teach the mighty lesson that he learned for all of you. He will remain with you to lead you from the hell you made to God. And when you join your will with his, your sight will be his vision, for the eyes of Christ are shared. Walking with him is just as natural as walking with a brother whom you knew since you were born, for such indeed he is. Some bitter idols have been made of him who would be only brother to the world. Forgive him your illusions, and behold how dear a brother he would be to you. For he will set your mind at rest at last and carry it with you unto your God. (ACIM:T-5.5)

 In Jefferson's day of course this whole issue was somewhat more acute than it is even today and Jefferson for that reason avoided publishing his effort. That only happened posthumously, but in his private correspondence he minced no words. Now, almost 200 years after Jefferson produced this gem, we are in a much better position. We now have the Thomas Gospel, which re-established the primacy of original Jesus sayings over the embellishments of Christianity, and not only that, we now have A Course in Miracles, and the DU tradition to close the circle, if the reader will pardon my pun.

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.

Serendipity Strikes - a thought of Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch

In high school, the Gymnasium Erasmianum in Rotterdam (and yes, it was founded in 1328), I had the joy of taking optional classes of Hebrew in my final two years. The teacher was a professor of Semitic Languages at Utrecht, and this was a side gig for him. The theory behind the program was that those kids who might want to go and study theology, could thus prepare themselves, since in Holland it was expected that any Pastor of a church prepare the texts for the Sunday sermon always from the original languages. I noticed that I had a class full of people who, like me had no interest in studying theology, but who vaguely understood that Jesus was not a Christian, so that to begin with it made more sense to study the Old Testament in the orginal language, instead of relying on translations which were often heavily biased by later Christian theology.
After graduation I sort of fell into a hole where I could not start college because I had to do my military service first, though I became a conscientious objector and did civil service instead for 18 months. While I was waiting for my assignment I made myself useful at the old school by collaborating with said Hebrew teacher as his teaching assistant. The program was that we studied Torah in the 2nd year Hebrew class, in which I would discuss the textst on the basis of a commentary by Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch, while the teacher would discuss grammar and syntax in parallel from a modern linguistic standpoint. I have later had comments back from people who were in that class and loved it. And for me it was certainly the basis for beginning to form more clarity about the fact that Jesus stood in a Jewish context, and that Christianity was a later fabrication, but really an extrapolation, an interpretation, that only cited him in name, but had little to do with his teachings.
Even before my Hebrew studies I had begun to collect Judaica, and read lots of things, and who knows perhaps the first impulse for that was given when at age nine or ten some time my parents had Prof. Martin Buber over for lunch one time, who impressed me greatly. I loved his German translation of the Bible, which he did with Franz Rosenzweig, and by age 16 I had read all of his works. A jewish bookseller, Lampusiak had been following my interest in Judaica, and he sort of became my mentor any time I came browsing his store, and we would have lengthy conversations. Anytime I would want to buy a new book in the realm of rabbinical studies, he would sort of give me his equivalent of a rabbinical exam, before he allowed me to buy the book. When I wanted to buy the commentary on Psalms from S.R. Hirsch at the end of my last year of highschool, he made me come back several times before he was satisfied that I knew enough to read it. Subsequently that summer, I bought Hirsch's commentary on the Pentateuch (Torah), in Amsterdam at De Pampiere Waereld, which was an antiquarian bookseller of world-wide fame. I realized the reason these books were so prized was that they were the last few copies of the original editions that had survived the Holocaust. The edition on Psalms still even had the original binding, but the Pentateuch had suffered the fate of many books during the war, when people tore the covers off, so you could not see the titles, and it was hoped that thus the Nazi's would not see that they were Hebrew books, and pick them up to be burned.
Over time my interest in Hebrew studies lessened. And at one point in time, in 1997, I donated a good deal of my library to the Foundation for A Course in Miracles, at that time in Roscoe, New York. My editions of S. R. Hirsch went along, if nothing else because I knew that Ken Wapnick, being a good Jewish boy from Brooklyn, although gone astray in his mother's eyes, would appreciate them. Then in 2000 when the foundation was going to move to its present location at Temecula, CA, Ken called me and said they could not move the books to the new location, so did I want my books back. Ever since then I've had numerous moves, sold and given away a lot of books, but S.R. Hirsch's books stayed with me and I kept asking around to either sell them to a good dealer of Judaica, where I would be assured they'd find a dignified home, or give them to someone who truly would value them.
Fast forward to June 12th of 2009, and I had some business dealings with a lady with last name - you guessed it Hirsch. So spontaneously, I asked her if she was related. Yes indeed, she was a descendant. And so I asked her, how would she like to own an original edition of the works of Samson Raphael Hirsch. She loved it, and I knew these books had at long last found the loving home they deserved.
It gets even funnier. During the same week I was contacted via Facebook, by a distant niece, daughter of my much-reviled grand-uncle Henri Louis ("Hein"). She grew up in Switserland and lives in Montreal, and during a phone conversation was able to explain to me that the Fentener side of my family were Jewish merchants and mariners in the 16th century. I shared with her that in grade school I was friends with a jewish girl, and her father always cracked himself up, that at any time I always seemed to have several businesses going, and he would slap his knees and say, you've got to have jewish blood! The niece meanwhile seemed to have rather deep insight into the reasons why both artistic and business talents were woven into the traditions of our family and we certainly had a shared interest in the one place where all of this came together in the printing of African cotton by Vlisco, of Helmond, which since ca 1963 is no longer owned by the family, but she and I still feel that it is in our blood somehow, and both seem to have a vivid interest in West African culture.

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.

Role Play, Empathy

I talked about role play in my last post, but there are many ways that we can engage in this, and you don't always have to act it out. One of the simple ways is empathy, truly allowing yourself to be in someone else's shoes, which I assure you will change your outlook on other people, and make you a lot less judgmental. And simply, we also enrich our experience. For one thing I had this strong feeling with Plato, in the times when I was actively reading him, it was as if I was at times transported to Athens to his academy, and of course many themes that are discussed in the dialogues are truly perennial questions of human life.

One of the fascinating exercises in this regard for me has always been to empathize in this fashion with the twelve apostles, being around Jesus. Once you break the mold of the dominant Christian interpretation of the New Testament, and bypass the judgment of many of the apocryphal materials as somehow irrelevant, and you just begin to read for yourself, I think the one issue that stands out the most is how the apostles were attracted to Jesus and his teachings, but in truth none of them understood him completely. This makes complete sense also with the comments that Gary Renard's teachers make in his books, namely the apostles mostly experienced another twenty or so lifetimes prior to enlightenment. And look at the stories, these guys are stumbling around, mostly not getting what Jesus is saying, yet listen again and again and again, and somehow in  their own way after he dies, they seem to know that their time with him was their greatest time ever, and it changed their lives.

These stories are no different from e.g. the relationship of Krishnamurti with the people around him. Nobody got him either. And of course it is always like that, which is why it's true as so many people have said that if Jesus just showed up one day, he would not be recognized, and possibly locked up in an asylum. And mentally we lock him up all the time. As long as we make the crucifixion the main event, in lieu of the resurrection, we in effect confine him to the historical role of the body that played him two thousand years ago in Palestine. If however the resurrection is the main event, then he is still with us now, (and we're still not getting what he says). We want most of all for this world to be good and real, and we don't really have ears for his Kingdom not of this world, that is, not until we are sick and tired of being sick and tired. And maybe just maybe, then we tune in to him, and like the apostles, we may not know what to make of him, but we know something sounds damned good and convincing.

A Course in Miracles makes it clear why we eventually listen. The point it makes is that even at the worst of times we are never quite one hundred percent crazy, for the mind that was in him is also in us, and one day we'll start paying attention to that little spark. Jesus' teaching of forgiveness is the method to allow that little spark to grow, until it can shine away the dark. When first we recognize it, a little child is born in us, and the more we can refrain from telling it who it is, but listen to it as it is teaching us, the better off we will be. And so we will humbly empathize with the apostles, who were only dimly getting who Jesus was, but they hung in there, for they did not doubt he spoke the truth. Now it is also no longer a problem that there are so many versions and stories about him, which contradict each other on many points. Not one of them has the whole story, they all merely reported it as best they could. Logion 13 in the Thomas gospel is very cute on this point, for it raises the issue loud and clear that the world is not ready to hear what Jesus really has to say. That is as true now as it was then. The only one who maybe got what Jesus was saying, Mary Magdalene, his wife, seems to disappear from the scene after playing her role as "the apostle to the apostles." The boys ignore her, and start founding religions, and schools, while she, the only one who maybe did get it, seems to wander off and not leave much of a trail. And as always the religions accomplish only one thing, namely we stop listening to the teacher, since we end up thinking we already know, so now we're telling him what he told us, instead of listening to him. Buddhist tradition has a wise saying about this: "What's known as the teachings of the Buddha are not the teachings of the Buddha." Realizing this, you leave yourself a chance to actually listen when you finally do meet the Buddha. By the same token, if we identify with the apostles in their failure to understand Jesus fully, perhaps we would keep our ears open as well. It might inspire some humility to actually listen. To me, that's the value of those stories. In short, this was not "50 way to leave your lover," but "12 ways to misunderstand Jesus," and, if we empathize with the characters, we may understand our own resistance to understanding what Jesus is talking about, and that is surely the beginning of wisdom.

Monty Python's Life of Brian

My friend Annelies reminded me that it was time for some serious fun and sent me this youtube link from the end of Monty Python's Life of Brian, which has to be one of the most delicious spoofs ever. It's the song Always Look at the Bright Side of Life and it sure as hell is a solid antidote at any time if you're at risk of taking life too seriously.

It always reminds me too of the work of the very serious gnostic teacher from the second century, Valentinus, whose school believed that during the crucifixion the real Jesus was looking on watching the crucifixion from under a tree, and smiling, in a manner not dissimilar to Buddha's meditation under the Bodhi tree, where you see him being attacked by angry demons, except he isn't there, it's just the empty seat, for the Buddha knows like Jesus knows that even the worst attack the world can make is pointless, because it is completely meaningless, not to mention not real. This of course is just another way of expressing the notion that the crux (pun not intended) of Jesus' teaching surely was the resurrection, and not the crucifixion.

And so, when we take the world too seriously, we can always be reminded of this and ask these great teachers to show us a better way of looking at things, after all, even in the face of death, what are you going to do? Die five minutes later? We knew going in what the deal was, we were going to die sometime, so what's a few minutes between friends? What's the difference, so the only things that are frightening in this world are so only because we believe they are, and if we change our belief, they can no longer frighten us. This is no different than a little kid who is afraid of the monsters under his bed. You help them change their belief system, and that's what Jesus or Buddha are there to help us do, because they fully realized the knowledge that the world is not real, and there is nothing to fear but fear itself.

In the Thomas Gospel it is amongst other things Logion 42, Be passersby, which reminds us of the same wisdom. Don't take life too personally, for it will kill you With that thought, I've gotta get back to work now.

Making a Christian out of Jesus: Stevan Davies

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Disappearance of the Universe

Gary Renard's work is at the center of Closing the Circle, because it is in his work that the connection is laid between the tradition of the Thomas Gospel, and A Course in Miracles, symbolized through his teacher Pursah in the book, who tells him she was Thomas in a prior incarnation.

This book is unique, and it became a huge hit without advertising budgets, just through word of mouth and through clever promotion over the web. Soon it became known as DU, and a Yahoo! group formed around it. It's also impossible to explain the book, beyond the obvious facts, for it really takes you on a ride over about a ten year period of the author's life, which is pretty indescribable. The title clearly grabs a lot of people, and if it works that way for you, you're in for a treat. The premise of the book is simple. Gary Renard is a regular guy with his fair share of troubles who at some point in time in his life strings together some fairly successful years as a guitarist, until it doesn't work for him anymore, and he takes a hard left turn. Among other things he has been practicing meditation, and one day when he comes out of a meditation in his living room in Maine, he sees on his living room sofa two people, who introduce themselves as ascended masters, Arten and Pursah, who in prior lives had been the apostles Thaddeus and Thomas. The form of the book is a series of dialogs based on this series of visits.

I recently reread the book very much in depth, because I was doing a translation of it into my native Dutch, which was definitely a fun challenge, as well giving me a good foundation to write some notes here. The book is in dialog form, and Gary's visitors give him a serious education in spirituality, which reframes his entire life, and part of that process works through introducing him in the early chapters to A Course in Miracles, which he was not very much aware of before this introduction. Arten and Pursah take him on a whirlwind tour, helping him to use his own experience to understand the application of the principles of the Course, focusing naturally mostly on the essential teaching of true forgiveness, which Jesus, as the Voice who addresses us in the Course, explains as the core of his teaching. It is evident that a meaningful understanding of forgiveness, requires the metaphysical framework of the Course, which has its roots in everything from Plato to Jesus, to Shakespeare, Freud and quantum mechanics. In other words, we are at a stage now, where we culturally have the ability for a much deeper understanding, and through this book Gary shares his own learning experiences with us, and the dialogs explore the Course concepts in every day language, making for a highly enjoyable read.

In the book Pursah makes the connection between the Voice of Jesus from A Course in Miracles, who points out a number of ways that his teachings have been misunderstood, and the Gospel of Thomas, which has often been misunderstood, because it doesn't sound like Christianity at all, but it was clearly older than the other Gospels which were included in the New Testament. Aha! So Jesus was not a Christian, because it had not been invented yet in his time. And suddenly the whole thing makes sense. In this particular book, Pursah discusses twenty two sayings from the Thomas Gospel, which she feels are most easily understandable for the modern reader. In my book, Closing the Circle, I've highlighted those sayings, as well as included a list of them in the back. Her point is simply that it's these 22 Logia, which the accepted Greek word for these Jesus sayings, are easier to get into without struggling too much with some of the cultural differences between then and now. Her comments on the Thomas gospel are seamlessly woven into the story, so that besides being a wonderful first introduction to A Course in Miracles for some, a refresher course for others, it is also a very powerful introduction to the more unvarnished Voice of Jesus (Gary calls him "J" in his books), which speaks from the pages of the Thomas Gospel.

In this context, Gary's choice for "J" instead of Jesus certainly has merit, for there is less of a tendency with that abbreviation to let our minds be cluttered by the whole historical burden of Christian tradition and theology, which has little to do with what he taught. We are now learning to listen to him fresh again, and that can be very helpful for our own relationship with him, and evidently for many of us this book has become not only an exciting read, but also an accellerator of our own spiritual lives, by connecting theory and practice in a previously undreamt of manner. This book is definitely of the "where the rubber meets the road" variety. You'll read it many times.

The Thomas Logia sound like Zen Koans sometimes

That sort of a comment has been quite common in the discussions around the Thomas gospel. By now we know enough to understand what happened to the Jesus tradition after his death: substantial embellishment. So no wonder that these early materials should have a different character.

Jesus may or may not have been to India in those first 33 years about which we know so little. We may not be able to know this for sure. However philosophically, since truth is one, and oneness is a non-dualistic concept, therefore it should not surprise if Jesus sounded like Buddha or like Advaita Vedanta at times. The explanation is not necessarily that he was exposed to those sources, although he may have been. People did travel. The summary of these different forms of belief system, from dualism to pure non-dualism is very well explained in Gary's 2nd book, Your Immortal Reality.

The philosophical point is perhaps more compelling. If truth is true, and all else is a lie, well, there are only so many ways you could express truth in words, particularly since words are by nature dualistic, and so you can only approach it, never state it explicitly. So at some level the most abstract expressions of wisdom teaching would have to sound recognizably similar. So to be "like the Buddha," Jesus does not have to be a Buddhist, or even have known about the Buddha. From that standpoint I am totally at ease around Gary Renard's frequent observation that A Course in Miracles is sometimes closer to Buddhism than to Christianity, although of course there are very dualistic traditions in Buddhism, but it does seem that in Buddhism more of the original non-dualistic teachings survived and even thrived at times.

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.

On Joining the Y

If it wasn't going to be Closing the Circle, perhaps the title of the book should have been Joining the Y, but while on the one hand the first required a subtitle to avoid confusion with other books with the same title, on the other hand Joining the Y might have been mistaken as a membership drive for a venerable youth institution, so Closing the Circle it is. However, I like the graphical notion of the Y as a symbol for the book, namely that it has two legs, ACIM and the Thomas Gospel, which come together in one Jesus. Just another way of looking at it, but it makes the point that the book is all about realizing that in truth, allowing for different times and places, the voice and the message never changed. This was the real promise of the Last Supper and the ritual that has been distorted as the Eucharist - Jesus promises that he is present to us in our mind whenever and wherever at our slightest invitation, exactly because he is not a body, he is not promoting the cannibalistic ritual Christianity has promoted instead. And the cover represents the one Jesus for all time, who is just the symbol of God's Love in our lives. We got lost, but we have the option of wandering back any time we like, and he comes in at our invitation.

The way it seems to be working out in practice is that the painting, Teach Only Love, on the cover really is the shortcut to the book, and I am gratified to see that it is being picked up by readers who previously did not know much about either ACIM or the Thomas Gospel. The first reports I received from Holland was that the picture practically made the book jump into people's arms. And the longer it is out there, I realize that my collaboration with the painter, Sam Augustin, is really a central feature of the book, and the fact that it's so inviting really is an integral part of the book itself. If a picture is worth a thousand words, the painting is better than any lenghty introduction.

Coincidentally, some people have asked why the two sources of light over Jesus' head in the cover art. Sam answered that in his mind that symbolized the omnipresence of Love, which then was focused in the presence of Jesus. It occurred to me that on some level it could also represent exactly the Y I'm talking about in this post, i.e. the two legs of ACIM and the Thomas Gospel, connecting to the one consistent manifestation of Jesus as the presence of Love.

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.

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Closing the Circle & The GoTh Timeline

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