Heart of Mind - Adventures with a Radio Show

Thursday April 9th, 2009, I was on the Heart of Mind Radio Show with Kathy Davis, on WBAI, 99.5 FM in New York - for an interview about my book, Closing the Circle.

Here is the link to the show... Interview on Heart of Mind with Kathy Davis
Kathy has previously interviewed Gary Renard, as well as myself about some earlier activities, but presently she has been reading Gary's books, as well as my own book, and she wants to discuss my book, Closing the Circle, so it could become a very interesting show. She also knows that I'm Gary's Dutch translator, and that I was recently on his Happy Dream Cruise in the Caribbean. Not only is Kathy's show excellent, she is also my favorite Qi Gong teacher in NYC, though I have not been to her classes since 5 years, because my life has moved to the East side of NY, more than the West side, and her classes are at Riverside Church at a completely inconvenient time.

Anyway, I just wanted to report this here.

Meanwhile this is now updated with the recording of the show. There was an interesting situation going on, from the standpoint that the birth place of A Course in Miracles, was in fact Bill Thetford's conversation with Helen Schucman about "There must be another way," because he was fed up with all the interpersonal conflicts they were suffering at work. During the show it was evident that there were in fact also serious conflicts going on at WBAI, including a situation where as we walked into the studio Kathy had to listen to a direct personal attack concerning her role on the board of WBAI. In short it was a repeat of all the same issues Helen and Bill once confronted, and to which the Course provides the answer, by teaching us how to make the inner choices that will lead us to a more peaceful way of being in the world and relating to people, never mind what sort of conflict, attacks, and pain are going on. The quantum forgiveness method of the Course definitely is the way out of pain and conflict.

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.

Thomas Logion 34

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

This quote of course is well familiar as it is quoted in Mt 15:14 and Lk 6:39 in the canonical tradition. However, the way it is construed in the canonical tradition as part of a story always creates a bias towards a certain way of reading it, which is absent in the Thomas material, where you're just looking at the stark statement. It may then be worthwhile to look at these statements within the context of the Thomas tradition itself, before they were woven into anything else. I would like to periodically consider the Thomas sayings here, not primarily as I do in the book, in the context of DU and ACIM, but first by relying primarily on the Thomas tradition proper, and more specifically Pursah's rendering of it, since I'm totally operating on the assumption that she effectively separated the chaff from the wheat.

The immediate and obvious associations are then that a blind person is someone who does not see, and who should therefore not be leading anyone else. And the obvious association with the second clause is that falling into a hole prevents you from getting where you were going. Thus the image is simply one of getting lost on our way by picking the wrong guide, in this case our blind eyes.

Within the context of the Thomas gospel itself, it is pretty evident that Jesus himself, in the way he speaks to us, at least exemplifies someone who does see. Starting in Logion 3 and in many other instances, Jesus points out things to us, his readers, his audience, which make it evident that he sees and we don't, but we could learn from him. So when we are looking to pick a guide on our journey who is not blind, definitely he should be our first pick. In Logion 3 he points out that Rather, God's Divine Rule is within you and you are everywhere. Evidently this means he is pointing out something to us that we currently do not see, and this is why we're listening to him in the first place. So in a way Logion 34 is a strong hint that we might try Jesus for our guide, because of his evident qualifications as "seeing" in this sense and not being "blind." Other similar implications can be found e.g. in Logion 5, Know what is in front of your face, and what is hidden from you will be disclosed to you. For there is nothing hidden that will not be revealed. Again, this also implies that Jesus knows what is in front of his face, and nothing is hidden to him, which he can tell is not the case with us, and we need help, and so he is telling us how to go about learning to see. In the present saying Jesus is gently advocating his services as a guide, over our various ego-friends who are stumbling around in the dark like we are, and under whose guidance we would fall into a hole. In terms of the Course this means choosing the Holy Relationship over the special relationship.

And we all know which hole he is talking about, for the hole is hollow, it is the ego's world of scarcity and lack, which we keep falling into until we realize as Helen Schucman and Bill Thetford did at that historical moment which preceded the dictation of A Course In Miracles, when they wondered together that "There must be another way." Falling into a hole, in that sense is an image similar to wandering around in the desert (dry, barren), and never making it to the promised land, and it symbolizes the condition of the ego, which always again offers us to gain the world but lose our soul.