Taking Things Personally

This is the opposite of what Jesus teaches, and in the Thomas material, Logion 42 more than anything else makes the point. It is not for nothing that Pursah in Gary's books calls that her favorite saying Logion 42: "Be Passersby." You get there by realizing with William Shakespeare that "All the world's a stage and all the men and women merely players." (And that includes you, kid! Not to mention it includes me too.)

There is one thing however that we should take very personally, and that is Jesus talking to us, as he does in the sayings. It seems to me many times that the very direct form of the Thomas sayings has that for its main purpose, to get our attention, and to relate to its source as if we were in a direct dialog. Thus to get out of our standing aside, and playing amateur historian, studying what this fellow Jesus said to this other fellow Thomas, as if it had nothing to do with us. Instead, we now have the opportunity to enter our own direct relationship with Jesus, and that is the clue to working with this material, as it is also with A Course in Miracles.

In Memoriam Joe Jesseph

Joe Jesseph made his transition recently, and from what I understood he left us in a clean and non-dramatic way, through an accident with a head injury, from which he was not to recover. He was an organ donor and kept on life support to harvest any organs that were wanted, and his final remains were disposed of through the mechanism of the Neptune Society.
I post this message here as a public service, since people might wonder why his blog stopped (RalphJos on Xanga), and to simply acknowledge my great gratitude to him for his patience and thoroughness, as well as for the book he left us with, reviewing the psychology of the Course in depth and in the context of psychology overall. I am sure the book will be around for a long time. He was a great help to me many, many times, ever since I met him at the Foundation for A Course In Miracles (FACIM) when it was still in Roscoe, NY in the 1990's.

His book, which I list hereby, A Primer of Psychology according to A Course in Miracles, is destined to become practically a standard work on the psychological system of the Course. Being a psychiatrist in life, Joe had the thorough formal training and experience in the field, to appreciate just how radical Jesus's approach is, as we find it in  A Course in Miracles. In this book he presents the Course's psychological system in a formal manner, with one of the key observations being from some of Ken Wapnick's workshops when he says that Jesus would use just one diagnosis, in the formal sense, namely "Son of God, separated type," noting further that our condition is pretty much a textbook case of paranoid schizophrenia, which in the normal medical sense is considered pretty well hopeless, but Jesus' forgiveness program does offer a way out of the maze of illusions. Of course having such a diagnosis in hand, would suggest to us that we should not underestimate the severity of our defenses.

I maintained a dialog with Joe for many years, and I was delighted by his undertaking of this book, particularly also because with my own psychiatrist father I had many interesting discussions on the nature of illness and healing. Very early he taught me that there was of course only "psychosomatic" illness, which was why he chose to be a psychiatrist. He dedicated his life to the spiritual dimension of healing, and I can only imagine he would have been delighted to find a formal approach to the therapeutic system of Jesus, as it is now available from the pages of ACIM. The shift that I witnessed Joe making, and then express through the pages of this book is certainly one that my father was searching for in his life. The transition is that from being a doctor to becoming a healer. All his life my father spoke of the idea that treating the symptoms was not healing, and true healing was making whole, thus expressing what the Course explains with the concept of the unhealed healer, as opposed to the teacher of God/Therapist/healer, who simply represents the thought system of wholeness and healing which Jesus gives us through the Course. Finding the Course I'm sure would have delighted my father, I would not doubt. With that in mind, I'll cherish Joe's book in the meantime.

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.

Some Scholarly Stuff about Thomas

Occasionally it makes me bristle when Gary or anyone states that my work would be 'scholarly,' in my view it is not, strictly speaking. I find that epithet a bit off-putting in the sense that I neither produce college textbooks or original research, even if I am--at times at least--a keen watcher of what is developing in some of the literature surrounding Thomas. And some good stuff has been percolating for years now in the community that studies Thomas with an open mind. A very interesting discussion about Thomas in relationship to Mark (my favorite of the canonical gospels), can be found here: http://users.misericordia.edu//davies/thomas/tomark1.htm and here http://users.misericordia.edu//davies/thomas/tomark2.htm

The above material in essence documents in a formal, scholarly fashion, having recourse strictly to the form of the material, and the sequence and circumstance of its borrowing, the transformation of Jesus teachings in their raw, relatively unedited form in the Thomas gospel, towards the Pauline/Christian rendering of him, of which Mark is the first example. Clearly the dominant influence behind all this is Paul and his interpretation of Jesus, which progressively pulls him into this world, and puts all kinds of theological make-up on him, ultimately insisting that the resurrection and second coming are of the body, thus accomplishing what the ego always wants to do, namely to pull Jesus down into the muck of this world with us, and solve our problems here, instead of us learning to follow him to a Kingdom not of this world, of which he speaks to us always. But which we do not want to hear about in the worst way. This last issue is of course the crux, and it is the reason why the Course spends so much time putting us in touch with our resistance to what Jesus teaches.

So, the simple thing to take away from it all is that the reason Jesus in Thomas does not sound like a Christian, is because Christianity is an ego-dominated, dualistic, distortion of his teachings, which fully makes the world real, and as such ensures that we do not hear what Jesus teaches in reality. And as Course students we may then always recognize that this is merely a very useful mirror of our own tendency to want to do all of these things with Jesus, thus compromising the Course. Our ways of doing so are often very subtle, but as we progress with our work they will become more and more clear and easy to recognize, and for many who are 'recovering Christians' forgiving Paul will be one way this process can take form, for different from what Dan Brown et al. believe, we were not duped into believing certain things while an evil church withheld the truth. The ego's conspiracy is always to set it up so that someone else can be blamed for our betrayal of our true Self, which in this Judaeo-Christian imagery is symbolized as the betrayal and crucifixion of Jesus, and we simply do not hear, and do not want to hear his message of forgiveness, the meaninglessness of the body and the fact that he does not believe in betrayal (ACIM:T-6.I.15:5) for those reasons, knowing us, as he does, as spirit. He is asking us to follow him and do the same, and we simply reinterpret him to make sure we don't, so that the ego stays firmly in charge. We simply resist, because we realize that if we are spirit, we didn't happen, and so we have to keep on killing Christ, as Wilhelm Reich fathomed in his own funny way (see his The Murder of Christ).

Fun with Thomas

In a way it would seem to be no accident that Jefferson's first name was Thomas, considering how his Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth, came so close to guessing the outlines of the Thomas Gospel, even if Jefferson's personal position as a "materialist" in a way prevented him from seeing the content of Jesus's teaching. In fact it is really remarkable, if you consider that what has generally been mis-labeled as "The Jefferson Bible," was completed in 1819, and the Thomas Gospel was not rediscovered till 1945, but translations did not begin to appear till well into the 1950's. The most salient feature of the Thomas Gospel is of course that it makes irrevocably clear why Jesus was not a Christian (since they had not been invented yet, and he never attended Paul's catechism classes), and Jefferson sensed in his stocking feet that Paul had distorted the teachings of Jesus, and called him names like a "dupe and impostor," and ruthlessly took out all of his writings, but also all of his theological influence (by excluding the narrative and interpretative dimensions of the canonical gospel materials).

With my own growing involvement in this topic the Thomas sightings are increasing, in a variety of forms. For one there was a time when I was in the studio audience when both Gary Renard and Micael Ledwith were on a panel discussion on New Realities TV, about spirituality and the new science, and I was aware that both Gary and Micael have recollections of past lives as Thomas. Then there's Michael Tamura, a friend of Gary's who also has past life memories of Thomas. More recently I met someone who was in India in Kerala, in the area where Thomas spent the final years of his ministry, and who experienced an appearance of Thomas while there. Further it appears as if recently there is a proliferation of people in my life with Thomas as either first or last name, and it is just kind of fun. I started writing about Thomas and he seems to be showing up around every corner.

The Gary Controversy Revisited

... those who seek controversy will find it. (ACIM:C.in.2:1)

From a recent post on Gary's site, I take it the controversy surrounding him is still being fed by some, apparently including the originators of it, the MPM-trio (Mundy, Perry, Mackie), as I deduced from the appearance of an article on his site by Dr. Michael Mirdad.

Since my book relies on Gary's work, I wanted to add a clarification of my own. Gary is irrelevant. I repeat that: Gary is completely irrelevant to the whole conversation. There is the simple matter separating the message and the messenger. If Gary blew it in your mind, or you don't like his looks, or his eyes, or his new Hollywood hairdo, so be it - forgive him already. Don't believe or disbelieve his work either because anybody says so, even Gary, or tells you not to, like the MPM-trio. The Course indeed is not a religion, there is no pope of the Course, though periodically some appear to be running for the job, but there is no such position available, since it is a self-study program. How you learn the Course is up to you, so it's your own decision if you find Gary's writings helpful or not. I could put that a different way. If you find yourself to sometimes feel like a fool, like Gary, who needs all the help he can get to learn the Course, slips on every available bananapeel the ego throws you, crawls back up, and yet realizes (like the little children of Lake Wobegon) that he has an above average ability to remember who he is in truth, perhaps you will identify with the story, and it can be helpful to you. If you don't, it won't, so don't bother.

Indirectly I address this issue also in my discussion of the "Pursah version" of the Thomas Gospel in Closing the Circle. Other than to note that it makes a lot of sense, the same goes here: you are entirely on your own in deciding if it is credible or not. Don't believe me either. Follow your heart. As I've pointed out in the book, Pursah just happens to make a lot of sense, and tangentially, it would seem pretty hard to make such a thing up, even if some of the edits Pursah offers seem quite compelling on close scrutiny. To think of them on your own, without any real guidance, would seem impossibly hard to me. Thus I think it is with this material much like it is with the Course, if it works for you, use it. And if it doesn't, don't bother. No harm, no foul.

In case of doubt about the above, the reader may note that Gary's books even says so. In particular on page 378 of Disappearance, Gary says to Arten: '... I always have to be reminded--and you're not just talking to me ayway, are you? And Arten responds: 'You got it, buddy.' And if you think about it, that says in two lines, what I just argued in this post. The books stand on their own. Take them or leave them, but their value to you is up to you, and is independent of anything else Gary says or does, and of whoever likes him or does not like him, or his books.