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.

Here is one clear example of how things come full circle, and therefore it underscores the reasons why the title of my book is Closing the Circle.

As Stevan Davies shows in his article Mark's Use of the Gospel of Thomas, Part I here is another case of total transformation. He takes as the main sources for the idea Logia 13 and 108, and then shows how the idea is developed into something altogether different, and unsurprisingly most definitely Christian, in the treatment in Mark.

Imitatio Christi is one of those theological concepts, which besides the later book by Thomas à Kempis, De imitatione Christi, gained some de facto early recognition in the development of Christianity, particularly in the early ages when it became fashionable to pursue martyrdom, as if that were the meaning of following Jesus, to die on the cross, or something closely similar, and to die for one's beliefs, as if Jesus was a mere religious fanatic. These concepts are always popular for it is the core of the ego's belief system.

The psychologically very profound presentation of A Course in Miracles really clarifies, how and why the Christian theological framework is really an embodiment of the ego's thoughtsystem, and diametrically opposite to what Jesus taught originally. Fundamentally this boils down to the idea that the ego-identity thinks it is really something, when Jesus in the Course dismisses it as a "tiny, mad, idea" (ACIM:T-27.VIII.6:2), in other words the ego IS the thought of separation, the thought that says it would be possible for part of God to exist separately and independently of him, and the manifestation of that thought is our body identity in the world. We thus think in our infinite stupidity, that what the Course calls "accepting the atonement," i.e. realizing inside that the separation is not only impossible, but never really happened, is absolutely a dangerous and deadly thought, which must be prevented at all cost. The atonement in the ego's eyes means that we must give up our ego's kingdom, which we call our "life" to accept his Kingdom, not of this (i.e. the ego's) world, and since our ego's would rather be right than happy (c.f. ACIM:T-29.VII.1:9). The ego portrays this as if we are giving up something for nothing, whereas Jesus is firmly of the opinion that we are giving up nothing (our illusory separate existence, which is making us miserable) for everything (his Kingdom, Heaven, Love, Happiness, returning Home, etc.). Thus it is indeed an ego thing to invest Jesus with suffering, as if that were the essence of his ministry, and then make it seem that the essence of our following him is to suffer like him. Well with that kind of advertising, few people would want to. So getting yourself crucified became briefly popular in early Christianity, but unsurprisingly the majority of people thought it was not such a hot idea. So this part of the story ends up with Jesus and a few saints getting themselves crucified, and the rest of the world placing their hope in this vicarious salvation.

What Jesus teaches and taught instead is that we simply need to realize that the ego idea simply is a joke, and not at all a reality, but an illusion we've bought into, and which resulted in the terrible nightmare which we call our life, but which is not our ultimate reality. His program of forgiveness shows us the way out of the insanity, and back towards Heaven. And that program begins with taking a step back from identifying with our bodily identity first, and learning again that what we really are is spirit.

Therefore the first step is actually in Logion 42, which Pursah calls her favorite: "Be passersby." It is an admonition to not identify with our role(s) in the world, not take them seriously, but to step back from that identification, and become more contemplative. It is in effect the first step of his forgiveness process. Another aspect of it is indeed contained in Logion 13, in the realization and understanding that the world is not ready to hear what Jesus teaches, and the question is not if the world will hear, but rather if we will hear, because then we won't need the world anymore. Finally Logion 108 is indeed a beautiful description of  the meaning of following Jesus:

J said, "Whoever drinks from my mouth shall become like me. I myself shall become that person, and the hidden things will be revealed that person." (PGoth, Logion 108)

The same thing is implied in the forgiveness process of the Course, and the idea that we should need to forgive Jesus, because as long as we think he is different from us, we have not forgiven ourselves either, but if we finally do accept the atonement for ourselves, and thus know we are forgiven, we will also be coming from the exact same point of reference as he does, and therefore be exactly like him in fully knowing that our reality is spirit and not the body. And that is also the logic behind the Course's explanation of the crucifixion, as being simply a demonstration of the truth that since we are not our body, even the total destruction of that body makes no difference to what we are:

The crucifixion is nothing more than an extreme example. Its value, like the value of any teaching device, lies solely in the kind of learning it facilitates. It can be, and has been, misunderstood. This is only because the fearful are apt to perceive fearfully. I have already told you that you can always call on me to share my decision, and thus make it stronger. I have also told you that the crucifixion was the last useless journey the Sonship need take, and that it represents release from fear to anyone who understands it. While I emphasized only the resurrection before, the purpose of the crucifixion and how it actually led to the resurrection was not clarified then. Nevertheless, it has a definite contribution to make to your own life, and if you will consider it without fear, it will help you understand your own role as a teacher.
    You have probably reacted for years as if you were being crucified. This is a marked tendency of the separated, who always refuse to consider what they have done to themselves. Projection means anger, anger fosters assault, and assault promotes fear. The real meaning of the crucifixion lies in the apparent intensity of the assault of some of the Sons of God upon another. This, of course, is impossible, and must be fully understood as impossible. Otherwise, I cannot serve as a model for learning.
(ACIM:T-6.I.2,3)

So, clearly, here Jesus tells us that it is not necessary to follow him in form, and get ourselves crucified, but only to learn from his extreme example, that indeed even that would make no difference to what we are. His point is here that if we fully know that spirit is the essence of what we are, we will also fully know that we are totally invulnerable forever. Our only problem arises from identifying with the perishable, our bodies, which then puts us in a fearful position, for everything in the world is a potential threat to that body. Here is finally the point Jesus makes in the Course, about our need to forgive him, i.e. to accept the atonement for ourselves, and thus finally accept that we are the same has he is, not to mention once again that this is framed within our relationships in the world, which are thus transformed into the Holy Relationship:

    I have great need for lilies, for the Son of God has not forgiven me. And can I offer him forgiveness when he offers thorns to me? For he who offers thorns to anyone is against me still, and who is whole without him? Be you his friend for me, that I may be forgiven and you may look upon the Son of God as whole. But look you first upon the altar in your chosen home, and see what you have laid upon it to offer me. If it be thorns whose points gleam sharply in a blood-red light, the body is your chosen home and it is separation that you offer me. And yet the thorns are gone. Look you still closer at them now, and you will see your altar is no longer what it was. (ACIM:T-20.II.4)

And so again we come full circle with the Thomas Gospel. In ACIM Jesus corrects the numerous ways his message was distorted, in the Thomas Gospel we find his teaching before all the distortions began, and Pursah's version even eliminates from the Thomas Gospel some distortions which have seemingly crept into the tradition.

Do We Want the Problem or the Solution?

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

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

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

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

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

The Words of the Master

In Gary's books there is reference to the other sayings tradition, which has been known since 1832, and which goes under the name of Q, for the German word for "source," which is Quelle. Gary's teachers refer to that collection of sayings as The Words of the Master, and they suggest that it was indeed in circulation right alongside the Thomas Gospel. In this way we get the completely sensible impression that the first manifestation of the Jesus tradition was in effect that these two collections of sayings were circulating, well ahead of the storybooks which became the canonical gospels, so that the sayings collections as a literary form are indeed more primitive and more original. For the Thomas gospel we have an incomplete collection of Greek fragments which dates from ca. 140 CE and we have the Nag Hammadi edition of 114 sayings which dates ca 200 years later, but clearly lines up well with the Greek manuscript which we have in fragmentary form. It is again by internal evidence, of who quoted whom, that scholars have come to think that the Thomas Gospel must have existed as a book before the canonical gospels of the New Testament. We do not have a manuscript for The Words of the Master (Q), but courtesy of the book I'm discussing here, we do have an insight in the proces of how the scholars have conducted their pearl-diving expedition in the existing texta, to recover a convincing outline of what the text of Q might have looked like. Having the Thomas text for comparison undoubtedly has helped this process, for again it now simply becomes clear who was quoting whom and how.

These days, we can find the text of the Thomas gospel in a wide variety of translations, some of which I've already reviewed here. Marvin Meyers edition remains a favorite, if only because of the support from Pursah, but Stevan Davies runs a close second in my book, in particular also because of his scholarly work on how the sayings were lifted from their source and molded into the then emerging Christian context of the first narrative gospels, some 40-80 years after Jesus's death. Of course Pursah's edition remains my real favorite, because it leaves out a lot of ambiguity.

As to the text of Q as well as other extra-canonical gospels, these days you can't beat the edition from the Jesus Seminar, edited by Robert J. Miller, The Complete Gospels, which I have reviewed here earlier. You really don't need anything else. Fundamentally, the impression you get from Q, similar to Thomas, is again that the Jesus who speaks here is not a Christian because the typical elements are absent, such as the absence of discussion of his death, and the presumed meaning of it, as well as really all other key theological notions that made Christianity what it is. This is why some scholars refer to it as pre-Christian. In form however, it seems to be a bit more extensive than Thomas, because there are complete dialogues here. Overall, the logical sequence of events now is seen to be that by and large the Thomas and Q traditions existed side by side and flowed into Mark, and Luke and Matthew quoted both Mark and Q, as well as Thomas. Because of the overlap it can sometimes be hard to tell which comes from Q or from Thomas, except if there are elements in common between both Luke and Matthew which are not in Thomas, then by a process of elimination they must come from Q. Now an example:

Can one blind person guide another? Won't they both end up in some ditch? Students are not above their teachers. But those who are fully taught will be like their teachers.

Q:(Luke 6:39-40)

They are blind guides of blind people! If one blind person guides another, both will end up in some ditch. Students are not above their teachers, nor slaves above their masters. It is appropriate for students to be like their teachers adn slaves to be like their masters."

Q:(Matthew 15:14; 10:24-25)

These two quotes were from Miller, ed., The Complete Gospels, p. 259.

Now, here is how the Critical Edition merges these two by interpolation into a hypothetical Q source:

Can a blind person show the way to a blind person? Will not both fall into a pit? A disciple is not superior to one's teacher. [ It is enough for the disciple that he become] like his teacher.

Q 6:39-40

For good measure, here is the parallel tradition from the Thomas gospel, Logion 34, in Pursah's rendering:

J said: If a blind person leads a blind person, both of them will fall into a hole.

And there you can hear a Jesus before Christianity, once you lift it out of the context of later narratives. The Jesus who speaks here (implicitly he is the teacher), is the same one who in the Thomas gospel says (Pursah's rendering):

Whoever drinks from my mouth shall become like me. I myself shall become that person, and the hidden things will be revealed to that person.

PGoTh, Logion 108

Here we find none of the tendency of putting Jesus on a pedestal and making him different from us, which is so prominent in the Christian rendering of him. It is instructive to compare a closely related concept in A Course In Miracles:

Equals should not be in awe of one another because awe implies inequality. It is therefore an inappropriate reaction to me. An elder brother is entitled to respect for his greater experience, and obedience for his greater wisdom. He is also entitled to love because he is a brother, and to devotion if he is devoted. It is only my devotion that entitles me to yours. There is nothing about me that you cannot attain. I have nothing that does not come from God. The difference between us now is that I have nothing else. This leaves me in a state which is only potential in you.

ACIM: T-1.3:5-13

So there we have a Jesus who simply says that we can learn from him because he's ahead of us, but there's nothing we cannot learn, as we have the full potential of realizing what he has realized already. This thought seems remarkably consistent with both the Q and Thomas quotes above, and the later Christian theology which puts Jesus more and more on a pedestal, and makes him as a person into God's only begotten son, and thus separate from us, who remain as adoptive children (according to Paul), reflects a different and later theological view, which developed among Peter, Paul, c.s., and was clearly not an original teaching of Jesus.

It remains a curious fact that Thomas Jefferson composed his "Bible," The Life and Morals of Jezus of Nazareth, in ca. 1819-1820, in other words, just before the Q hypothesis was firmly developed. Some have observed that there is a strong correspondence with the Thomas material, but we might note here that Jefferson's method was comparable to how scholars have arrived at Q, namely simply comparing texts side by side. Jefferson's efforts don't quite have the same scholarly character as the modern research into Q, but overall the broad direction of his inquiry, and his conclusions are the same, namely the original Jesus taught something very different from the Christian version of him, and it is worth returning to. Because of Jefferson's own bias, as a self-styled "materialist," he may at times have left out too much, but nevertheless, his effort is testimony to what was in the air, and now it has been validated at least in outline by modern scholarship. So, if nothing else, Jefferson was remarkably perceptive. And like Jesus, he was not a Christian.

The Critical Edition of Q,  which I'm dabbling in from time to time, is really a modern, scholarly version of a process for which Jefferson laid out the model. This edition is overkill for most students, because it gives the parallel passages in Greek, with English, French, and German translations, but if you care to follow how the scholars arrived at Q precisely, this is your book. And in-line with the work of Stevan Davies, it allows us to see many times how a lot of material about Jesus only becomes Christian because of the context in which we first learned of it, namely the narrative gospels of the New Testament, which uniformly have some amount of editorial influence from the emerging belief system of primitive Christianity interwoven in the narrative. In many cases reading the statements without the surrounding editorials, can be quite startling at first, when we come from a Christian culture, and we can only marvel again that Thomas Jefferson sat there in his office culling his book together with scissors and glue, with little else to guide him but his own intuition. In short, what Jefferson felt in his stocking feet, is now pretty much established by historical scholarship, and serendipetously reconfirmed in the work of Gary Renard, through the comments of Arten and Pursah, in their recollections of their prior incarnations as Thaddeus and Thomas respectively.

Back to the Gospel according to Mark

Some years ago, in the aftermath of a post of mine about Thomas on the DU group on Yahoo!, which Gary later used in Your Immortal Reality, someone made a comment that I should write a book about Thomas. I figured Gary's work was enough, besides I was working on a translation of the Gospel according to Mark, and advised the party of such. To which I got a reply that nobody would read my book about Mark anyway, but everyone would read a book about Thomas. I felt hurt and insulted for about a week, but then I turned around and realized that perhaps I should listen to this suggestion. Shortly we will start finding out, as the book is due out in late summer, and in fact I received the very first advance order the other day.
Meanwhile, I have come to realize during the work on the book about the Thomas gospel, that in reality it was an invaluable preparation for the book on Mark, exactly because it forced me to really sort out my notions of what happened in those early years, and how Thomas clearly comes before the influence of Paul, whereas the canonical gospels all come either contemporaneously (Mark) or clearly after Paul.

Meanwhile, working on the problems of the tradition in the context of the Thomas story, has brought it much more clearly into focus for me just how many levels of distortion are really at play. Evidently, in the earliest, living teaching, if there is any real connection to the teacher at all, and a living awareness of the content (meaning) of the teaching as opposed to the form, being true to the spirit, would allow the apostles to use any kind of example (parable) at all to make a point, as long as they were in the living awareness of serving the same truth Jesus did, and thus were saying the same thing in spirit, even if the form might have been different. Yet, even at that level distortions would creep in almost immediately, for, just as much as we do not understand the non-dualistic teaching of A Course In Miracles for a long, long time, until we begin to fathom it experientially, similarly the apostles, still rooted in their roles in the world, were only rank beginners in understanding Jesus. Hence we end up looking at the accounts, canonical or otherwise, not as consummate expressions of realized truths, but as the first tentative accounts of truths which the writers of these accounts barely had begun to fathom, except they knew it was important enough to write down.

And, in the event, there also are some circumstances which now make it easier for me to work on the Gospel according to Mark, and share some of that work with the readers. As of recently, I have set up an account at www.GreekBibleStudy.org and linked it to my Facebook account. The best way to hook up to this is actually to find me on Facebook, and to click on the "B" symbol on the left hand side under "applications" and then to join the Greek Bible study site from there, the point being that within Facebook you can actually read my notes, along with the English text, while on the Bible Study site, you get more columns of text, including the Greek text, but you cannot (yet) get access to my notes. Therefore at this moment the only way to access my notes is through Facebook. Once you know, it's easy. (Note: As of 12/19/09 this has not been working for a while, but I will reflect it here whenever the site completes their upgrade, so it can work with Facebook again.)

The focus of my notes on Mark will be on seeing that whole book from a right-minded perspective. The foundations for the notes I will develop there will be based mostly on Jan Willem Kaiser's book Beleving van het Evangelie (Experiencing the Gospel), on the Course, and of course the Thomas Gospel. I now realize why I had to write Closing the Circle before going on with the Mark project. All going well the Mark project will result in two books: my own fresh translation of Mark with some added materials from J.W. Kaiser, most notably his Introduction to the Study and Interpretation of Drama.

The major shift is to completely appreciate that then as now the teachings came in a dualistic form, representing a non-dualistic teaching, or as Kaiser would put it, a message of Eternity clad in the images of Time. The imagery was simply different then, than what we now have in the Course, but the range of misunderstanding is the same, starting out with taking things literally. So come and visit me on Facebook if the idea of taking a different look at one of the Gospels is appealing to you. My own foundation in this regard comes from J.W. Kaiser, but nowadays Eckhart Tolle also has some interesting observations about the real meaning of Jesus in the quotes we know of him, and his observations closely parallel the work of Kaiser.

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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