Ascended Whatteh Whatteh?

In The Disappearance of the Universe, Gary Renard describes how his teachers, Arten and Pursah appeared in his life, when one day, when he woke up from deep meditation in his living room in Maine, they were just sitting there on his couch and started a conversation.

They describe themselves as Ascended Masters, who just materialized on his couch at that point, purely to be helpful to him. They also explained that in prior lives they had been the apostles Thaddeus and Thomas respectively, but that they appeared with altered names but in the form they would have in Gary's next life. But wait a minute, it gets worse than that, for by the end of the book, they also explain that Gary will know Arten in this life, though in this life she will be a woman, but he does not know her yet at the time when they tell him this. Furthermore Pursah explains that Gary will be her in his next life, at the end of which she will marry Arten, who again is a man in that life, which is supposed to be Gary's last. Along the same lines they also explain that Gary himself thus was the apostle Thomas earlier.

There is a point to all this. This whole Gordian knot of intertwined lives and personalities, who are having their meetings in Gary's living room, taken together demonstrate the holographic nature of our time-space experience, which boils down to this: we do not incarnate in bodies, but rather "bodies"/"lives" are just like movies, projections in the mind, and the universe of time and space is just a virtual multiplex cinema, where you can potentially wander in and out of lives at will. It takes a while to digest all this, but once you do, it is a whole lot more sensible as an explanation for a wide range of phenomena, out-of-body experiences, re-incarnation included. So it is as Einstein surmised, all of time is simultaneous, and past and present are but a figment of our imagination.

In that context the concept of Ascended Masters also starts to make sense. In his book Gary adduces material from A Course in Miracles, which explains the concept, though the terminology is slightly different--here Ascended Masters are referred to as Teachers of Teachers, but the idea is clear: 

There are those who have reached God directly, retaining no trace of worldly limits and remembering their own Identity perfectly. These might be called the Teachers of teachers because, although they are no longer visible, their image can yet be called upon. And they will appear when and where it is helpful for them to do so. To those to whom such appearances would be frightening, they give their ideas. No one can call on them in vain. Nor is there anyone of whom they are unaware. All needs are known to them, and all mistakes are recognized and overlooked by them. The time will come when this is understood. And meanwhile, they give all their gifts to the teachers of God who look to them for help, asking all things in their name and in no other. (ACIM:M-26.2)

These notions have turned up in many traditions, a.o. the Hindu/Buddhist/Theosophical notions of the Mahatmas, or the Rosicruscian notions of the Order of the Holy Cross, (Fama Fraternitatis), the Theosophical notions of the White Brotherhood, and the Chassidic notions of the unknown 36 Zaddikim who "hold up the world," and so on. Typically Jesus, Buddha, Krishna, Quan Yin, etc. are thought included in this group. The notion is actually very simple and straigthforward, if this time space experience is a dream, or in modern psychological terms, a projection, then it is possible to wake up from the dream, courtesy of the process that is traditionally referred to as Enlightenment. It is as simple as realizing that the emperor has no clothes on, and not only is there not there there, but there is no here here either. There is only here and now. Or, as A Course in Miracles puts it, "It is a journey without distance to a goal that has never changed." (ACIM:T-8.VI.9:7) Fundamentally then, the logic is that we only experience this world because we believe in it, and as long as we believe in it, and that with the process of awakening, there comes a time when it serves no more purpose to be here. At that time however it becomes possible to be present in this dream merely to help others, and that presence can take many forms, it can be totally ethereal or it can take physical form as in the appearances of Arten and Pursah for Gary. In the Christian tradition of course the appearances of the resurrected Jesus to the apostles reflects the same notion.

If you recall the story of the doubting Thomas, who wanted to touch the risen Jesus, in order to believe in him, it is kind of funny that Gary (who, as Pursah explained to him was himself Thomas in a prior life), in his book describes how he wanted to touch Pursah, to make sure she was "real." In the literature this mistake is repeated by the famous encounter of Dr. Samuel Johnson, with Bishop Berkeley, in which Johnson wants to refute the Bishop's point of view that the material is appearance not reality. Johnson kicks a stone and his toe hurts, and he famously exclaims "Thus I refute thee." It is however an example of circular reasoning, for the body is part of that same physical reality, and it is designed to operate in that reality, and the example is merely a case of the physical vouching for the would-be reality of the physical, and therefore it is circular and tautological, and proves nothing. The secret lies in the mind that devises the experiment: what is it looking to prove? If it wants to prove that it's projected reality is in fact "real" then Dr. Samuel Johnson was the perfect manservant to provide that demonstration, but the mind that orchestrates the experiment is not itself part of that reality, it is merely something it perceives, by reason of its vested interest in the reality of that reality, since the mind itself projected it.

In the end, this is why the Course asks: "Do you prefer that you be right or happy?" (ACIM:T-29.VII.1:9) So, if the ego is right then its puppet, Dr. Samuel Johnson has a point, but if Jesus is right, that his Kingdom is NOT of this world, or as he teaches in Logion 42 "Be passersby" then this is all a joke, and it hurts more if you take it seriously. Comedy is really the best relief.

Logion 13 and Mark 8:27-33

The following is again based on Stevan Davies' discussion of Mark's use of the Gospel of Thomas, Part I, and part of my ongoing exploration on how the nature of Jesus's teachings was altered in the transition from the simple sayings of Thomas to the narrative gospels which began to appear on the scene 10, 15 and 20 years later.

Logion 13 is fascinating, even without the additions Pursah offers to it in The Disappearance of the Universe, in which she proposes what the three things were - which of course the whole world has been guessing at ever since the text was discovered. Here is the text in the Pursah rendering from Your Immortal Reality:

J said to the disciples, "Compare me to something and tell me what I'm like."
Simon Peter said to him, "You are just like an angel."
Matthew said to him, "You are like a wisdom teacher."
Thomas said to him, "Master, my mouth is utterly unable to say what you are like."
And he took him, and withdrew, and spoke three sayings to him. When Thomas came back to his friends, they asked him, "What did J say to you?" Thomas said to them, "If I tell you one fo the sayings he spoke to me, you will pick up rocks and stone me, and fire will come from the rocks and consume you."

Mark, 8:27-33 (NIV):

Peter's Confession of Christ
27 Jesus and his disciples went on to the villages around Caesarea Philippi. On the way he asked them, "Who do people say I am?"
28 They replied, "Some say John the Baptist; others say Elijah; and still others, one of the prophets."
29 "But what about you?" he asked. "Who do you say I am?" Peter answered, "You are the Christ.^[a]"
30 Jesus warned them not to tell anyone about him.

Jesus Predicts His Death
31 He then began to teach them that the Son of Man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders, chief priests and teachers of the law, and that he must be killed and after three days rise again.
32 He spoke plainly about this, and Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him.
33 But when Jesus turned and looked at his disciples, he rebuked Peter. "Get behind me, Satan!" he said. "You do not have in mind the things of God, but the things of men."

Again, we can only be amazed at the difference, as Jesus becomes domesticated through the subsequent editing of the tradition about him (instead of: of him). For one thing, of course in the context of the emerging orthodoxy, it is Peter who gives the winning answer, though up to that point the gist of the story might be somewhat comparable with the Thomas version, namely that the world is not ready (by definition) to hear Jesus's teachings of a Kingdom not of this world. However the further framing of the story in the Markan context again hijacks the pure teaching, and frames it now in the Christian mold where the upcoming death of Jesus is of the essence, and his presumed suffering beginning to be construed as an important sacrifice ordained by God, which is very, very different from the simple image which is evoked by the notion of simply saying that the world is not ready to hear this message. Peter's recognition of Jesus as "the Christ," likewise serves the Christian purpose of validating Jesus as special, and a "savior," when the point of his teaching was exactly the other way around. The section headings of the NIV reinforce this Christian theological slant even more.
With the availability of the Course and the deeper psychological understanding which it fosters, we can now also increasingly understand why it is that we do resist the message so much, namely because our ego has us convinced that accepting the atonement will be the end of us, when the truth is that it would be the end of the ego, not of us as who we are in truth -- namely spirit. In other words the risk is that we would be happy, instead of miserably hanging on to the ego.
The original teaching of Logion 13 makes that simple point, which in the story Thomas is apparently beginning to appreciate, namely that the world really is not ready to hear Jesus's message, nor will it ever be, by definition, based on the understanding that the world was made as an attack on God, being the embodiment of the ego-thought of separation from God. Jesus's message, or the atonement, after all is the message that the separation did not happen, so neither the ego, nor the world it projects are real. The only thing that is real and eternal is the love of God, and what keeps it out of awareness is our identification with the ego-self, the false self, the persona, and that is how our ego keeps us wrapped around the axle, fearing we will perish when we accept the atonement for ourselves, when instead it is the ego which will perish, and which we are NOT, in spite of its best efforts to convince us otherwise.
Thus the real issue is not that the scribes and Pharizees, or whoever, out in the world, is not accepting "Jesus," but rather the other way around, that we don't take responsibility for the fact that we don't accept him, while the Course is really showing us the mechanisms why we don't and helps us to remove the cloaking of the ego, and learn to look at its seething snake pit of hatred with the love of Jesus beside us, so that ultimately we should be able to forgive ourselves for what the Course calls the "tiny, mad, idea" of the separation, and laugh it all away with Jesus, as he also suggests in the Course. The critical passage is:

Let us return the dream he gave away unto the dreamer, who perceives the dream as separate from himself and done to him. Into eternity, where all is one, there crept a tiny, mad idea, at which the Son of God remembered not to laugh. In his forgetting did the thought become a serious idea, and possible of both accomplishment and real effects. Together, we can laugh them both away, and understand that time cannot intrude upon eternity. It is a joke to think that time can come to circumvent eternity, which means there is no time. (ACIM:T-27.VIII.6)

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.

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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