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.

Absence from Felicity

Here is another book that was mentioned in Closing the Circle, and I have sofar not discussed in full on this site. I doubt anyone would read this book unless they were already interested in the Course, and for as much it is a biography, it is really about the Course which would seem to have been the defining event of Helen Schucman's life and work. Actually, the publishers of A Course in Miracles, the Foundation for Inner Peace, have a lot of material now available on-line on their recent new website, and one important audio segment is Helen's discussion of the Voice, which would make it clear to any one why Helen's years with the Course were to her the defining experience of her life.

This biography is very much in depth, and it could only conceivably be written by one who understood Helen and the Course very deeply, not to mention someone who would have to be an accomplished psychologist himself to be able to write this. Since helping Helen with preparing the Course for print, Ken Wapnick has simply become the pre-eminent teacher of the Course, and this book reflects all of that experience, and it exhaustively addresses the need of the Course student who at some point becomes interested in the context in which the Course arose. The essence of the story is simply that besides all of the evident (with the benefit of hindsight) seeds that were present in the lives of Helen and Bill, the fundamental point is that they were in a professional situation that was rife with conflict, jealousies, including a fair amount of tension between the two of them. Professionally Bill was a professor of Medical Psychology at Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center, and Helen was a Research Professor under him, and they had their offices in the Black building at West 168th Street in Manhattan. So they were in New York, the Empire City, highly symbolic of all the world has to offer, good and bad. And one day they found themselves completely fed up with the professional tensions they had to deal with, and prior to going to a meeting at another facility, Bill voiced this to Helen in the now famous "another way" speech, in which he simply expressed to her that there had to be another way of relating to people and much to her own surprise, never mind his, Helen spontaneously agreed to help him find it. It was not too long after that that the Course started making itself manifest to Helen's mind. The rest is history, as they say.

This book will undoubtedly satisfy any student wanting to gain a deeper understanding of the birth place and process of the Course, and it is fascinating to see how Helen's entire life prepared her for this experience, starting from the fact that she had a long standing and early attraction to Jesus and the Bible. I can almost see her as a young child going to service at a Baptist church with the family's black maid, and all the other ways in which she explored her relationship with Jesus during her life. If there is any story that is my favorite in this book, there is the dream in which she experiences a man who helps her and intuits that this is Jesus, and later when awake asks Jesus, how come he looked like Bill, and the answer is, "Who else would I look like?" In a way this is the essence of the Course, namely it ALL happens in relationships, and depending on whether we see our brothers with the ego or the Holy Spirit, our experience of them will change accordingly, until we truly understand that they are always our best way home, and we learn to recognize our savior in them, and as the Course puts it, learn to "see the face of Christ" in them, which comes only from practicing forgiveness, until we finally have no need any longer to project any guilt onto our brothers.

Also helpful is the fact that through Helen's own experiences we can see all the mistakes we ourselves tend to make in our relationship with Jesus and/or the Holy Spirit, such as trying to use them as Santa Claus, as in Helen's episodes with Jesus's Higher Shopping service, where she felt he helped her find the green panty hose she liked best, or conversely she experienced that if she was on the outs with him, she could not find anything at all. To a greater or lesser degree we've all known such episodes. If you lose something in your house, the chances of finding it are slim to none if you give in to the upset, whereas if your mind is at peace it'll just turn up when you need it. All of these episodes help to underscore the very practical meaning of the Course. Meanwhile Helen's own life also shows us why the Course's primary focus always is on seeing the ego with open eyes, and understanding honestly that it is our own resistance that prevents us from following the Course completely right away. It is a process, and this book can certainly be helpful to many.

Lastly, this book is important for the historical record, now that there are so many bootleg versions of the Course on the market, which are being promoted by unscrupulous individuals, who are achieving little but to obfuscate the message with controversy about the text of the Course itself. No author would appreciate it if the early drafts of their work were made public, and that certainly applies here. The fact that the copyright on the first edition of the Course was invalidated for technical/legal reasons has little relevance either. Once you understand the publication process of the Course, it should be clear to anyone that you always want to work with the current 3rd edition from the Foundation for Inner Peace (www.acim.org), which is the original publisher, established in conjunction with Helen and Bill, and completely faithful to their intentions. The 3rd edition includes the pamphlets that came later, The Song of Prayer, and the psychotherapy pamphlet.

The Thomas Logia sound like Zen Koans sometimes

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

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

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

Jefferson Revisited III - Independence, Abolition, Projection

This is just a note resulting from this book, which only relates to the topic of this site in a sideways manner, but it is very important to remember... in the period 1790-1804 with the slave revolts in Haiti and finally its independence from France going on, the fear in the US was understandably of such a slave revolt happening here, for inevitably there was guilt about the system of slavery, so therefore there must be fear that the system should be challenged.

It seems relevant to notice however that the fear was founded in two ways, number one perhaps being the example of it happening in Haiti, which was the proximate cause for the concern, the second one however maybe equally or almost more important to remember, is that there was also the fresh memory of throwing off British rule which was felt to be illegitimate and oppressive, in a manner not dissimilar in which blacks might find slavery oppressive in the US. In short, the innate fears that aside from justifications the young republic had any subliminal doubts, these would as a result of projection, immediately translate into the suspicion that the blacks would do to them what they did to the British. For the same reason on subliminal level the independence itself was no doubt the biggest motivation for justifying abolition, entirely in line with the extremes of cognitive dissonance that TJ in particular must have felt about it in Paris and after, amid all the rhetoric of the rights of man etc.

No Christmas in the Thomas Gospel

There is no Christmas in the Thomas gospel, because it only has the teachings, and none of the stories about him, which as a literary form naturally only developed after his death, when his life was being mythologized. The Thomas materials, as much as the hypothetical (but now reconstructed) Q Gospel, which Gary Renard refers to as The Words of the Master, were simply his words, his teachings, with little or no ambiance and storyline, at most some very sketchy situational details, which simply serve as reminders for the practical context in which they occurred. For as he also says in A Course in Miracles, "You have surely begun to realize that this is a very practical course, and one that means exactly what it says." (ACIM:T-8.IX.8:1) This is very crucial to realize, that J presented a very concrete and practical teaching, which just became muddled later, as the stories of others about him began to become more important than what he actually taught. The Course restores that balance, by presenting Jesus's teachings in modern form in an unprecedented way, and Gary Renard's work with its connection to the Thomas gospel lay the bridge to recognizing that very simple and straightforward message again. The only thing to do is to follow him, which means to practice what he taught, more so than to repeat it. The world of course merrily went about repeating it, and for the most part not practicing it, and to the extent it was repeated without understanding, the message got buried under the mythology, though some of that mythology could, if properly understood, be very helpful indeed.

The symbolism of the birth as an inner event, born from the recognition of our true spiritual source, is very powerful. A Course in Miracles, helps us see it in this way, in that the Christ indeed is born to us as and when we choose "another way," in the form of the path for forgiveness, and the implied invitation is that we can turn to him, and he grows within us as we increase in faith in him. Here is how the Course reinterprets the story:

    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.
  When anything seems to you to be a source of fear, when any situation strikes you with terror and makes your body tremble and the cold sweat of fear comes over it, remember it is always for one reason; the ego has perceived it as a symbol of fear, a sign of sin and death. Remember, then, that neither sign nor symbol should be confused with source, for they must stand for something other than themselves. Their meaning cannot lie in them, but must be sought in what they represent. And they may thus mean everything or nothing, according to the truth or falsity of the idea which they reflect. Confronted with such seeming uncertainty of meaning, judge it not.  Remember the holy Presence of the One given to you to be the Source of judgment. Give it to Him to judge for you, and say:

Take this from me and look upon it, judging it for me.
Let me not see it as a sign of sin and death, nor use it for destruction.
Teach me how not to make of it an obstacle to peace, but let You use it for me, to facilitate its coming.
                                                                                                          (ACIM:T-19.IV.C.10-11).  

Seen this way the whole story is that Jesus is a presence for which we need to make place, if only just barely (the manger), for the ego, the world really do not have place for him, but because in the end that is not who we are in truth there always still is a place within us, where he is welcomed. And what he represents is the hope and promise that as we withdraw our investment in the world of duality with all its challenges, of up and down, etc., which offers no hope at all in the end, because it offers only division and darkness, we will remember him, make space for him, and with him, by practicing what he teaches, we will learn to remember who we are in truth, for with him we learn to invest in wholeness, not in division (separation). In the Thomas Gospel he expresses this beautifully in Logion 61:

I am the one who comes from what is whole. I was given from the things of my Father. Therefore, I say that if one is whole, one will be filled with light, but if one is divided, one will be filled with darkness.

Jefferson Revisited II - Special Relationships

One of the most fascinating questions that for me is raised by this book, is wouldn't it be easier to examine the relationship between Jefferson and Sally Hemings in light of the Course's view on special relationships, and how all relationships start for the wrong reasons? I think the answer is yes, though the general reader would not be helped by this, and so I'll attempt here to summarize the Course's ideas on special relationships in plain language, without making it a formal introduction, and I'll use Annette-Gordon Reed's analysis of the Jefferson/Hemings relationship as my main point of reference, and I think this will end up proving the point.

The fundamental notion of the Course's view of special relationships is that we are not who we say we are, and specifically we are not the separated individual we think we are, and the special relationships in our lives serve merely to protest that we really, really, really now are who we say we are, which is not to be dislodged until we perhaps start to suspect that "the lady doth protest too much," as Shakespeare expressed it, and we begin to disbelieve the story, and start looking for "another way." In this context there is thus a dynamic of hatred, which must be appreciated to get an honest understanding of the situation. Moreover both special "love," and special "hate" relationships are expressions of that same dynamic of hatred, and belief in differences, which is the non-existent foundation of the ego system.

In this book about the Hemings family, Annette Gordon-Reed goes to extraordinary lengths to discern the dimensions of the Jefferson/Hemings relationship, and I think she does an absolutely incredible job navigating the scarce evidence, and interpolating from a lot of circumstantial information to evoke a picture that few have managed to discern, and which some have taken offense at, namely that there could have been anything like love involved in this scenario. I think her analysis is right on, it just feels intuitively right, and it befits the subtlety and complexity of Jefferson's character that this should have been so. At the same time the ego's bargain is also in evidence, and actually simplifies the analysis.

For again, on the basis of the psychology of the Course, the purpose of the special relationship is to make the individuals involved good and real, and thus to keep them vested in their (false!) identities, not to mention to shut Jesus out as completely as possible. Now I have already spoken in my book and elsewhere on this blog of Jefferson's curious relationship with Jesus, which is an interesting topic in its own right. It behooves us to remember that all of us have a right mind and a wrong mind, and one or the other can play itself out in different scenes of our life. Johan Willem Kaiser, who has been a very important teacher in my life has a very helpful expression for what the Course terms the special relationship. He called it a "duo-self-preservation-effort," and that describes exactly the ambivalent, and even completely contradictory nature of it, which I'm suggesting would make the Jefferson/Hemings relationship easier to understand.

Thus, since bodies cannot communicate, and only spirit can, the special relationship as a so-called relationship between separate bodily identities, characters on the stage of the world (think Shakespeare, "All the world's a stage"), is rooted in the ego's intention to demonstrate that we exist, we are separate, and we are real. It is the most powerful witness to the reality of the ego's world, and it behooves us to remind ourselves from time to time that the truth never needs witnesses, because it is simply true--with or without witnesses that say so. This also means that we thrive by communication failure, and we are scared out of our wits at the thought that communication should be possible, which sometimes shows up in the fear of "losing ourselves," in a relationship, which is merely a cover over the fact that the purpose of a good special relationship is to lose our (true) Self, and reaffirm our (false) ego-self. Therefore, regardless of what happens on the surface, the foundation of the special relationship is the belief in differences, which is how the ego wants to define us. And generally the more the merrier, for the purpose of the relationship is to keep spirit out, and the ego firmly in charge, so the more differences the better it often is. This does not mean that on the surface a relationship cannot appear to be loving, that's just a matter of what kind of a play we decided to be in in this lifetime. At the core of it, the foundation, the special relationship is part of the ego system, and based in fear, hatred and the belief in differences, and ultimately the separation from God. Most of all we can ill afford to be like him (That's why the Christian belief that we should be " sinners all,"  became so popular). Once we understand this even a little bit, it is also clear why these relationships are sometimes loving and sometimes full of hate, and one can easily turn into the other, for they are merely two sides of the same coin, in reaffirming the belief in duality, which is a fundamental premise of the ego's existence, without which it is utterly meaningless, and thus " out of business."

Therefore all the differences which help define the relationship serve the ego's purpose of keeping differences real, and making our individual egoic in this world a reality, which substitutes for the Kingdom not of this world which J taught about, and keep it safely out of awareness, for that is the process, as is clearly demonstrated in the Thomas sayings as well, e.g. Logion 3:

J said: " If your teachers say to you, ' Look, God's Divine Rule is in the sky,'  then the birds will precede you. If they say to you, 'It's in the sea,' then the fish will precede you. Rather, God's Divine Rule is within you and you are everywhere. When you know yourself, you will be known, and you will understand that we are one. But if you don't know yourself, you live in poverty, and you are the poverty."

The ego, or the thought of separation, is invested in us NOT knowing ourselves as who we are in truth, namely the Son of God, and therefore the same as Jesus (i.e. we would understand that we and he are one), as long as we don't know ourselves (i.e. continue to identify with the false self, or ego self), we continue to live in poverty, because we are then invested in the ego's belief in lack. But, we will not take responsibility for that belief and therefore we project our guilt onto others, and believe they have stolen the peace of God from us, and if two people effectively manage to mutually maintain that projection, this is what the world calls a marriage made in Heaven. Through this union we now choose to believe that we regain the bliss of Heaven, never owning up to the fact that we ourselves threw it out to begin with. So as long as two people mutually agree to supplement that lack for one another, that sort of an arrangement can appear to be quite stable at times, or at least until one of them forgets to put out the garbage on time, or something equally silly. In this context then, it can be seen how the ego's nefarious logic, and the strenght of this ego-conspiracy is served, by all differences that play into this, because they reinforce the underlying belief in differences which is the foundation of that relationship. Thus master/slave, black/white, man/woman, tall/short, and any other dualistic dimensions of like nature reinforce the underlying bargain, the bargain to shut God out. In the fascinating relationship at hand there are numerous additional dimensions which make it clear how one gets from the other what they need to reinforce their own role. Specifically, Jefferson had promised his wife not to remarry, and taking a black concubine under the perceptions of the day nicely met that condition, while of course for Sally the possibility of a relationship, even while giving up a shot at freedom in France, achieved eventual manumission for her kids. Likewise for the 'legitimate' children Sally was not a threat, because she could be safely ignored, and could not inherit property, other than what was given to him during his lifetime or explicitly in his will. There are other interesting dimensions, such as in a master/slave relationship, eventually the submissive/slave is in control of the relationship, in subtle ways, and this was from time to time expressed as the master becoming the slave of the slave, because slave-ownership then defined the master as who he thought he was, and a slave-owner without slaves is nothing. The element of bargain was also present in the form of Sally's apparent negotiations with Jefferson in Paris, where she was pregnant just before they were to return to America, and negotiated that Jefferson would free all her children when they turned 21.

Therefore, when seen strictly in terms of these categories which serve the two personalities involved in their own view of themselves, it becomes much more clear why a relationship like this could indeed work very well for all concerned, as it reinforced the realities of the chosen roles. After that, the choice if we act this out in a more "loving"  way or as a special hate relationship really is circumstantial, and too often one turns into the other, without really changing the dynamic, unless and until at least one partner starts looking for "another way." For Love is only Love in the full awareness of oneness, as suggested above in Logion 3, and Jesus's teaching of forgiveness as expressed in the Course is the most direct path to that living awareness, of which we catch mere glimpses at first (what the Course calls " Miracles"), but which can become our living reality in due course, as what the Course calls "the Real World." Love can only be born from a relationship through quantum forgiveness, Course style, which does lead one (or both) partner(s) to realize that we are one, and not separate, for in the realization that we only project separation onto the other in all of our various accusations and irritations, the awareness of our total oneness is born and only that is love. The atonement is the realization there was no sin, only a silly mistake, and that is when the true love of the Holy Relationship dwells in our heart.

As to Jefferson, it seems clear that besides his amazing intuition of the core of Jesus's teachigns, that he fathomed at least something of the forgiveness process, and the true meaning of love, as is evident from a letter to his daughter about an upset she was having, which is quoted in this book on page 428/9:

Every human being, my dear, must be viewed according to what it is good for, for none of us, no not one, is perfect; and where we to love none who had imperfections this world would be a desert for our love. All we can do is make the best of our friends: love and cherish what is good in them, and keep out of the way of what is bad: but no more think of rejecting them for it than of throwing away a piece of music for a flat passage or two.  (Letter TJ to Martha Jefferson Randolph, July 17, 1790)

"What It Says": From the Preface of A Course In Miracles

This book is a more recent contribution from Ken Wapnick, but in a lot of ways, next to A Talk Given, it may be one of the more suitable "introductory" books available from his hand, which is the main reason for including it in the reading list in my book. At the same time it is also a very useful recap for long time students.

In short, while I don't believe I quoted this book specifically in Closing the Circle, I included it in the reading list with the thought that it is highly suitable "for further reading." My book tries to be accessible for both people who had not known of the Thomas gospel before as well as for people who had not heard of A Course In Miracles before, in effect bringing the two together. Along those same lines the bibliography is trying to be helpful towards the next step to take. Simply put, if you weren't already a student of A Course In Miracles, it is a bit harder to really see the coherence of the Thomas message in the spirit of Pursah's commentaries to it, and it helps to have that frame work, and this booklet of just 75 pages, which covers the third section of the Preface to the Course is very comprehensive indeed. In fact the only word for it is exhaustive, but in Ken's inimitable style it manages to be not exhausting, but a gem. Ever since his involvement with Helen Schucman in the editing of the Course manuscript, Ken has emerged as the leading teacher of the Course, simply because he does not mix in anything else. He is a very literate person, and can and does draw from his extensive knowledge of literature and music, not to mention psychology, but his fundamental approach always is to explain the Course in it's own terms, without mixing in anything external, except for an example that can help us on our way to integrate this material. He is at it again in this book. It should be noted that in most cases, to write a 75 page booklet about 4 pages of text might seem to be overkill, but the reason it is not is that truly in these 4 pages all the seeds are planted which will flower subsequently in the 1400 pages of the Course itself, and the commentary of this book helps us to see that, for otherwise we might read right over it.

Ken compares this section to the overture to a symphony, or the prelude to an opera, and his commentary makes it clear in detail how essentially all the major themes of the Course's teaching are present in this section, and the groundwork is laid for a more exhaustive treatment later on in the text. So the foundation that is laid here begins from the beginning, which is the distinction of the Level One teaching of the Course, which is introduced with the famous lines, summarizing the Course teaching from the Introduction to A Course in Miracles:

Nothing real can be threatened.
Nothing unreal exists.
Herein lies the peace of God.

It seems so simple, but most of our lives we don't get the obvious, since the ego is all about complexity. To my mind these lines always seem to be a corollary to an old Dutch saying, which in translation would sound as follows: That's why we suffers mostly here, from the suffering we fear, (My translation is slightly poetic, to preserve the rhyme, here it is in Dutch: Daarom lijdt de mens het meest van het lijden dat men vreest). The peace of God thus depends on the ability to tell apart truth and fiction, for our suffering is entirely in the realm of the illusory ego-world of projection, and the truth or realith in us can never be affected or changed by anything external. Learning to understand that viscerally is the bridge that Jesus or the Holy Spirit lead us across if we practice the teachings of the Course, which are the teachings of Jesus in modern form. The next issue which this section of the Course then addresses, is the level of our experience, so if Level One is about the abstract understanding of the difference between Heaven and the world, Level Two is about the level of our daily experience, and learning to tell the ego and the Holy Spirit apart, and learning to choose the miracle of forgiveness instead of the ego's pain.

Throughout this little book Ken connects the abstract concepts of the Course in many ways to our practical experience, such as showing how the scarcity principle, which as an expression occurs only in this section of the Preface (though the words scarcity and lack appear throughout the Course to indicate the fundamental nature of the ego thought system), finds expression in such experiential "facts" of life as addictions (never enough of xyz), and blackholes, which seem to vacuum up matter, which disappears into nothingness at that point. Evidently it is again no accident that not only were Helen and Bill, who collaborated in writing down the Course psychologists, but so is Ken, and his profound ability to help us connect the Course's teachings to our daily experience, with complete intellectual integrity is his abiding contribution to the teaching of the Course, and this little gem of a book will no doubt be helpful to many.