Closing The Circle

The Jefferson Bible - Facsimile Edition

2011-10-22T13:15:00.000-04:00

I've blogged here before about the Jefferson Bible, and of course I dealt with it extensively in my book, Closing the Circle. My earlier blog on the Jefferson Bible referred to a specific edition of it, that edited by Forrest Church which I think is more or less the standard at this moment.

Now, however, the Smithsonian is publishing a facsimile edition of Jefferson's original, which will be quite interesting to see.

At the same time, it makes me wonder if it was this re-publication of the original which actually might have been alluded to in Gary Renard's narrative in The Disappearance of the Universe, on pages 218-219. That was written and published at a time when the Jefferson Bible one one edition or another had been continuously available, and yet it refers to its not being available with the following somewhat befuddling statement: "Of course he [Jefferson] couldn't make it available to the public at that time without being accused of terrible things, but it will be made available soon for those who want to see it."

It is particularly the phrase "want to see it" which intrigues me - because again the text has been continuously available, but seeing a facsimile of Jefferson's actual, manual product is something else altogether. The reason I have any inkling is because in the Forrest Church edition of the "Jefferson Bible" there are three facsimile pages from the original, and you can't help but visualize Jefferson at his desk, communing with Jesus as best he understood him, and with scissors and glue pasting together, guided by intuition and common sense, that which he considered to be authentic and lopping off all the circumstantial stuff which he considered ballast. It is a completely fascinating image.

The image is all the more intriguing because it is a prototype of the process we all go through at some point in time if we turn inside and try to understand what it is Jesus teaches, and make at least a start with developing our own relationship with him. In the process we have to liberate him out of the dustbin of history, and forgive him, as he alludes to in several places in the Course, for not being the idol that we have made of him. To the ego, Jesus is terribly offensive, which is an entirely reasonable position, because Jesus pulls the rug out from under the ego thought system. Hence it is necessary, if we want to turn to him with an open mind, to first forgive him for not being any of the things we are prejudiced to think he is.

I am made welcome in the state of grace, which means you have at last forgiven me. For I became the symbol of your sin, and so I had to die instead of you. To the ego sin means death, and so atonement is achieved through murder. Salvation is looked upon as a way by which the Son of God was killed instead of you. Yet would I offer you my body, you whom I love, knowing its littleness? Or would I teach that bodies cannot keep us apart? Mine was of no greater value than yours; no better means for communication of salvation, but not its Source. No one can die for anyone, and death does not atone for sin. But you can live to show it is not real. The body does appear to be the symbol of sin while you believe that it can get you what you want. While you believe that it can give you pleasure, you will also believe that it can bring you pain. To think you could be satisfied and happy with so little is to hurt yourself, and to limit the happiness that you would have calls upon pain to fill your meager store and make your life complete. This is completion as the ego sees it. For guilt creeps in where happiness has been removed, and substitutes for it. Communion is another kind of completion, which goes beyond guilt, because it goes beyond the body. (ACIM:T-19.IV.A.17)

and

Is he the Christ? O yes, along with you. His little life on earth was not enough to teach the mighty lesson that he learned for all of you. He will remain with you to lead you from the hell you made to God. And when you join your will with his, your sight will be his vision, for the eyes of Christ are shared. Walking with him is just as natural as walking with a brother whom you knew since you were born, for such indeed he is. Some bitter idols have been made of him who would be only brother to the world. Forgive him your illusions, and behold how dear a brother he would be to you. For he will set your mind at rest at last and carry it with you unto your God. (ACIM:T-5.5)

In Jefferson's day of course this whole issue was somewhat more acute than it is even today and Jefferson for that reason avoided publishing his effort. That only happened posthumously, but in his private correspondence he minced no words. Now, almost 200 years after Jefferson produced this gem, we are in a much better position. We now have the Thomas Gospel, which re-established the primacy of original Jesus sayings over the embellishments of Christianity, and not only that, we now have A Course in Miracles, and the DU tradition to close the circle, if the reader will pardon my pun.

Stop it!

2011-04-12T10:14:00.000-04:00

There is a funny Bob Newhart skit on YouTube called Stop it!

Jesus is a little more gentle in the Course, when he says:

How long, O Son of God, will you maintain the game of sin? 2 Shall we not put away these sharp-edged children's toys? 3 How soon will you be ready to come home? 4 Perhaps today? 5 There is no sin. 6 Creation is unchanged. 7 Would you still hold return to Heaven back? 8 How long, O holy Son of God, how long? (ACIM:W-pII.4.5)

Or, to put it differently, the problem is always the same, it is our belief in the tiny mad idea of separation, which keeps us in the self-destructive pattern of choosing the crucifixion (being buried alive in a box?!) over the resurrection, of choosing the body over the spirit, of choosing form over content. The wheel of Samsara, the ego's hamster mill is to keep making the same dumb choice over and over again, and expecting a different result. Jesus in the Course is perhaps the better choice for a therapist, because he does not just tell us to stop it, but he teaches us forgiveness, which brings us back to the mind, so that we can change our mind, and step off of that wheel of repetitious justification of our one bad decision. He also says: "Therefore, seek not to change the world, but choose to change your mind about the world." (ACIM:T-21.in.1:7) He had the same focal concern in his original teachings, teaching us to change our mind, "metanoia" in Greek, meaning a change of mind, not just repentance in the moral sense as it was misunderstood later.

Much like every good lawyer knows that the best way to thwart a law is to satisfy the letter of it, and do what you want anyway. This is the ego's strategy - to kill the spirit by choosing the form. Jesus constantly reminds us not to, most famously in the New Testament in Mt 16:11 where he tells the apostles (again): "Don't you still get it that I was not speaking to you of breads?" I.e. he was speaking of the content, not the form, while they keep asking for the form, not the content. This IS the tiny, mad idea at work, this is to say I prefer the specific "something," over the everything of the Kingdom. Thus the ego asserts it is right, and ensures we will not be happy.

In passages like Mark 4:2, Jesus tells us that to those outside the Kingdom, it all comes in parables. In other words, as long as we're joining with him, looking at things from "above the battleground," from the mind level, or the Buddhic plane, we look with him at content not form, and thereby we can change our mind, which changes everything. Again in Mark, in 4:34 he makes it clear that when we join with him, he explains everything. This is the essence of the forgiveness process in the Course. Particularly if you read Mark in the original with Thomas beside it, you could start to hear these original teachings quite clearly.

There is more as you go along. There are numerous references to eyes that do not see, and ears that do not hear, as well as interactions where Jesus restores sight and hearing. Or, in Mark 5:36 Where Jesus "overheard" the meaning of the words, and clearly is not confused by the form. Evidently he "overhears," as much as he wants us to "overlooks" the ego, because he hears and sees through the form to the content, as would we if we join with him, which is the essence of the miracle as A Course in Miracles presents it: taking back the projection and thereby empowering ourselves to change our mind by now choosing Jesus or the Holy Spirit, our Right Mind. As long as we see the problem in form, in the world, changing our mind is impossible, which is the very purpose of the world. Only once we realize that our mind is projecting the problem (as long as we are choosing the ego), can we take the projection back, and do something about the cause of the problem, in our minds, by turning to a different teacher.

The point is, Jesus always was, and always is teaching from a non-dualistic perspective, about his Kingdom, not of this world (the world being dualistic), the Kingdom that our unseeing eyes don't see, and our un-hearing ears don't hear, because "the world is too much with us." (Wordsworth) And he was clearly always teaching about projection, as the teaching of the splinter and the beam should make clear. However, as the world inevitably distorted his teachings, particularly in Matthew, Luke and Acts, the teachings are increasingly diverted to justify the formation of religious communities, to bring people together in religious gatherings, and evolve into the church in the literal sense, instead of the promised joining with Jesus which is the message of the Eucharist, and so the church eventually becomes a worldly influence. What we do with his teachings is to pull them into the world more and more, to bring the solution to the problem instead of the problem to the solution, as the Course would say. So, if we bring him down into the world, to fix the problem where it can never be fixed, we are recruiting Jesus in the service of Caesar, which is exactly what happened.

In that context now, the Bible emerged as a very political document, which is dressed up by theological opinion and given the authority of being God's word, and the world seems to quickly forget how much the inconvenient aspects of Jesus' teachings were edited out in the selection process of canonical versus "apocryphal" books. This "Bible" becomes the justification of the founding of the Church, and Christianity as a religion, and it is taken very literally, to justify the most convenient reading of it. Subtle distortions and interpretations creep in, all the way to the "Heavenly bread" of the Lord's Prayer, which gradually evolves into our "daily bread," and Jesus becomes the spokesman for the Wonderbread account. Only if we start hearing the freshness of the original documents again, and avail ourselves of some of the literature which was excluded from it, can we restore some of the freshness of the original impression of Jesus, and can we start to hear him differently. A Course in Miracles is another path which brings us back to these original teachings of Jesus, by focusing us on content, not form. Its message of the Simplicity of Salvation ultimately revolves around the very basic insight that once you really see the ego for what it is, would you want it? When that stark choice becomes clear to us, through our incremental practice of forgiveness, what else is left to do but accept the Atonement?

In a variety of ways the Course provides a clear and explicit contrast to "the Bible" as a tool of Christian theology and dogma, there are also numerous allusions to the notion that the same stories could be read very differently, if we read them with the Holy Spirit. However the increasing attention to some of the apocryphal literature is advance the cause further, to a more independent reading of the Jesus literature.

The Thomas Gospel in particular, because of the total absence of a story line to dress up the various Jesus quotes, very clearly uses imagery to make a point, and clearly not to try to tell a story in the historical sense. In it we find Jesus pretty much as the teacher of nondualism, of choosing his Kingdom over this world of time and space.

In the synoptic gospels the sayings are framed in stories, which to the modern reader creates an impression of literal story telling, but it is doubtful if the reader in Jesus' time would actually hear them that way, when they are seen in the context of the rich mythological traditions of the Hellenistic world in which these stories unfolded. Moreover, even in the synoptics - as noted above, Jesus frequently admonishes us that it all comes to us in parables.

But in process of the birth of Christianity as a religion, there was an increasingly strong tendency to take these stories literally, and not as parables, and eventually the whole framework is adapted to justify the founding of what would become the church, and Christianity, and causing them to be read more as history than anything else, and construed in a moral sense to form the basis of that faith.

The symbolic reading of the stories as parables has been traditionally shunned by the emergent church and a more psychological/mythological appreciation, such as could be found in Philo of Alexandria and others was shunned. But even such a heavily interpretive approach was hardly reflective of the way Jesus taught, if we listen to the Thomas Logia. Even the Gospel of Mark still has a very abstract quality, which is very different from the story tellers of Matthew and Luke who purposely try to weave the Jesus story into Jewish tradition in the first case, and justify the formation of the Church in the second, turning the stories more and more in to would-be histories, with moral points. The Gospel of John however reverts again to a heavily symbolic and mythological framing of the story, which could not possibly be confused with the more narrow story telling of Matthew, Luke and Acts.

The more inner directed, and experiential way to relate to all this which was prevalent in the mystery religions of the Hellenistic world was completely blotted out by the emergent church, but there is no doubt it was around in great volume, but it just fades into the background in the face of the overwhelming "success" of the Christian religion which comes to replace Jesus' teachings. Eventually thousands of " Christianities" are either rooted out or forgotten or both, as the one dominant Catholic religion emerges under the sponsorship of the later Roman Emperors. Thus we end up with a literal church, a real estate empire, and gathering individuals in religious meetings, as well as proselytizing and missionary work, which shift the focus of the teachings from changing our mind to converting others, from inner change, and following Jesus, to a confession to a formal faith in an external Jesus, and from inner change to a moral philosophy and regulation of worldly affairs.

As the Bible emerged as the monolithic Holy Book of Christianity, and supposedly the Word of God, this literalistic, fundamentalist reading became the norm, and Jesus' original teachings were fairly effectively edited out of the book. The world had successfully replaced his very threatening teachings with an idol of him, a "bitter idol," as the Course calls it, for in the world's version Jesus died on the cross, and we can be none to certain that we'll rejoin with him after death. Throughout A Course in Miracles we find entirely the same theme, and there is ample opportunity at times to distort the Course by taking it literally, which leaves nothing but the empty form of knowing, let alone interpreting the Course, in lieu of practicing what it says, and turning to Jesus or the Holy Spirit as our teacher.

Above the Battleground

2011-04-04T08:46:00.001-04:00

In the gospels Jesus is frequently quoted as asking the apostles to follow him, which is another thing which has been most often distorted by taking it literally, and in some absurd forms at times as in when early Christians thought that the imitatio Christi meant to get yourself crucified like him, when evidently the opposite was the case.

Jesus speaks clearly of a Kingdom not of this world. In the Course the first step in that direction is frequently expressed as the view from above the battleground, i.e. to join with Jesus in non-judgmental observation of the movie that is your life and forgive all the actors in it, including the character who plays you. In the previous post about Ken Wapnick's book on the Course and the Bible, I referred to the difference in the choices we face as they are presented in traditional Christianity - very much an egoic thought system - namely deliberate choices between good and evil, and between real alternatives in the world, seeking to make a difference.

In contrast to the above the Course exhorts us: "Therefore, seek not to change the world, but choose to change your mind about the world." (ACIM:T-21.in.1) We should note also that even in the canonical literature of the NT Jesus constantly refers to a Kingdom not of this world, and again joining him in the view from above the battleground is the first step towards learning to see things his way.

Lionardo da Vinci, who must have known enlightenment also, just like Shakespeare, wrote:

" Noi tutti siamo esiliati entro le cornici di uno strano quadro. Chi sa questo, vive da grande. Gli altri sono insetti." (As quoted by J.W. Kaiser in Four Open Field Books, p. 81), alternatively the quote is given as:
‘Noi tutti siamo asiliati, viventi entro la cornici di uno strano quadro. Chi sa questo, viva da grande. Gli altri sono insetti,’ in that form it apparently comes from a correspondence with one Gabriele Piccolomini and one wonders if that is a fictional character? After all Gabriel means " God's Strength" and "piccolomini" would mean something like "little littleness," (think: "a tiny mad idea.") It all sounds like Leonardo might have been writing to his decision maker: If you chooses who you really are, you are God's strenght, but as the ego you're but a little fart.

The english rendering would be approximately: "We are all banished between the corners of a square frame. Whoever knows, lives grandly. The others are insects." That conveys the point exactly, for when you contemplate all those heavy choices in the world, a, b, c, d and e, and God only knows what else, and you then go inside to look at it all above the battleground, suddenly you might realize as you're holding Jesus' hand in the balcony seats there, that you're looking at reruns from something called "Rogier's Life" (fill in whatever name you wish) which is this movie you were watching, and which a minute ago seemed so real if not terrifying at times.

As I was writing this, my dear friend Annelies Ekeler, occasional co-author on this blog, researched the provenance of this quote from Leonardo, and it may not be attributable to him at all... the only connection seems to be a Dutch author, Godfried Bomans, who quotes the presumed letter from Leonardo, as if it were fact in his book Erik of het kleine insectenboek (Eric or the book of small insects). Bomans would be perfectly capable of making up such a story, with names that seem real enough (apparently there was a real Piccolomini family in Siena, but nothing is known about their ties to Leonardo). In all the point is valid as is Leonardo's real life motto: "Oh, poor mortals, open your eyes." Evidently he wasn't kidding, and people promptly forgot the most important thing he ever said. Such is life.

A Course in Miracles and Christianity: A Dialogue

2011-04-02T09:24:00.000-04:00

These notes are hardly an attempt at a book review - the book doesn't need it, it's a classic. While I do go over the book in some detail, my main focus here is to sort out my own experiences and recollections that were triggered by the reading of it.

A Course in Miracles periodically gives rise to confusion if its use of language is mistaken for Christian. It is not, in the same way that Jesus was not a Christian in the narrow sense, because Christianity was not conceived by him or even during his lifetime, but is an interpretation of him by others who came after.

A certain amount of confusion has occurred from time to time when statements from the Course get mixed in with Biblical quotes, without clarifying the different context. This books seeks to address this issue, and clear up the confusion by clarifying the profound differences between traditional Christianity and the teachings of the Course. What makes it so valuable, is that the format is one of a dialogue between friends, who obviously mutually respect each other, and undertook this conversation purely to be of service to others, since the evident potential for confusion helps nobody.

However, it would be a mistake to think this book is only for Christians trying to make up their mind about A Course in Miracles. The fact remains that throughout Western culture, we are imbued with the history of Christianity, and the image of Jesus and his death on the cross is ingrained, even if for some that very image, and the presence of suffering in the world, may be part of the reason they rejected the teachings, and became atheists, such as is the case in our day and age with Bart D. Ehrman. The concept of the creator force is the same if we call it God, or Nature, or Evolution. It is the concept where the cause of our life experiences is external to us, and life "happens" to us. Along with this world concept of individual existence and a separate reality, the belief in sacrifice is completely ingrained in the ego's belief system. It is the difference between regarding the universe and the world as an objective, tangible reality, or as "maya," or illusion, a dreamworld caused by the mind, in which we are hoist on our own petard as long as we take that first cause - what the Course calls the "tiny, mad idea" of separation - seriously, but which can also be undone, by learning not to take it seriously any longer, through forgiveness.

A perfect example of taking things seriously is Christianity in all its forms, starting with its redaction of the Bible, and bombarding it into a Holy Book, after selecting just those books that are supportive of the Christian dogma, and discarding, if not burning, the rest. For the purpose of the discussion in this book then, "the Bible" is seen as the instrument of that Christian dogma, and of mostly taking the stories of the Bible quite literally, and granting it a sometimes problematic coherence by regarding it as the Word of God. Outside of the Christian context the Bible could obviously be read in different ways, as is suggested numerous times in the Course itself, a possibility which is also cited in the introduction to this dialogue. Taken at its face value as Christianity does, the Bible is as solid as Newtonian physics, and unreservedly dualistic, granting the physical world reality by declaring that it was created by God. Everything more or less follows from that.

The dialogue in this book represents a very fair and balanced presentation of the differences between this traditional Christian view of the world, which so much permeates the Western world, and the very different view point of A Course in Miracles. The categories which are discussed are basic, and quite conclusive:

The origin of the world: God created it (Christianity), vs. it's an illusion, a dreamworld projected on the basis of the tiny mad idea of the separation (Course).
Jesus: Exclusive, and different from us as literally God's only son - the Christ (Christiantiy), or inclusive and same as us, but first to remember Who we really are in truth, and teaching us how we can learn the same thing, in awakening to the Christ Mind where the sonship remembers its oneness. (Course).
Crucifixion: Purposely suffered and died sacrificially in an act of vicarious salvation (Christianity), or did not perceive the attack because he knew he was not his body, and did not suffer, but taught only Love and forgiveness (Course);
Resurrection: Bodily resurrection after the crucifixion (Christiantiy), and the resurrection came before the crucifixion in the form of awakening from the dream and remembering who he was, and doing so before us, so he can now help us, as our older brother and teacher to lead us home (Course).
Eucharist: The believers share in Jesus' vicarious sacrifice of his death on the cross, by symbolically partaking of the wine and wafer transmuted into his flesh and blood (Christian), or his followers share in his spirit, celebrating his presence to them in the mind as a demonstration that he did not die, but is alive in them (Course)
Living in the world: This of course is where the rubber meets the road, and - (very) loosely paraphrasing the book here the alternatives look like:

Christian style: Jesus, the Word become flesh, God's only son, who suffers and dies for our sins on the cross, and seven days later ascends and goes to Heaven, sitting at the right hand of the Father. He leaves us, the adopted children, with the promise that if we lead good and moral lives in this earth, and present our book with green stamps (good deeds), much like the S&H Green Stamps of old, at the gates, we may join him in Heaven after death, when the tally is made up for a game in which salvation can be won or lost based on making meaningful moral choices of free will. Thus our "stamps" are credits towards a hoped for future redemption. Temptation in this model is the doing of evil deeds on this moral field of experience;
Course style: Jesus as the manifestation of the Holy Spirit, who went before us as our older brother, remembering the way home before we did, who awakened to his true Identity so that he did not suffer when the world crucified his body, but instead only forgave, demonstrating (teaching) only love, for that is what he is and what we are, and who constantly reminds us that in making the same choice with him, and joining with him in the atonement, we are making the choice of hell or heaven in real time.
The HS Green Stamps (Holy Spirit Green Stamps) in this case are not meritorious deeds collected towards a future stay with Jesus in the balcony seats of Heaven, but rather miracles - a Holy Instant, a momentary view from the balcony seat with Jesus. While we are still too afraid to choose them permanently, the miracle is our experiential confirmation of what it feels like to choose Him as our teacher over the false authority usurped by our jailer, the ego. When at last we become clear that our only fight is with ourselves and not with an angry God who opposes us, and that we only put the jailer in business by continuing to vote him in office, then we are free to learn how every miracle lessens our allegiance until we finally change our vote and join with Jesus in the atonement. We learn to "teach only love" with him, as we accept his love for ourselves. On this path then, our deeds will become more and more loving as we progress in choosing only Jesus as our teacher and guide, but the choices between A, B, or C in the world are seen as only a distraction, and literally a temptation to solve on the physical level what can only be solved by changing our mind ("metanoia" was the N.T. Greek expression for that). Thus in this model the choices are between heaven and hell, freedom and imprisonment, and we experience it as the ability to shift our allegiance from the ego and its separation thoughts, to Jesus and the Holy Spirit, in a joining with Who and What we really are in truth - spirit, and an integral part of the Sonship.
This life now is a growth path towards spiritual adulthood, by shifting from a teacher of scarcity, slavery and imprisonment, suffering and death (the ego), towards listening to the Voice for God, who is ever present to us within (the promise of the Eucharist), never mind how much we bury him under the worldly drama. He remains the ever present Alternative, the Other Choice. In this model the world simply loses its hold on us, as we choose for freedom. Thus Jesus' living presence to us in the now, is restored to us by our choices, until we fully realize we really are him, for the illusion of a separate free will was the cause of our suffering and pain, and giving that up is no sacrifice at all. Free will then is the freedom to choose the Love of God, in lieu of the incarceration of the ego.
N.B. This paraphrasing was very liberal indeed - I made up the whole thing about the green stamps, but hopefully it serves as an illustration. I could also add that in the Christian tradition "taking up our cross," has been understood as following in Jesus' footsteps as the suffering servant, in the mold of the passages in Isaiah which describe this. In the Course, "taking up our cross," would refer to taking responsibility for the fact that we chose the ego and crucifixion, simply because we cannot undo the choice until we first take responsibility for it, and recognize we made it in the first place. This willingness to see that we made the wrong choice and would now make another one is what the Course calls the " little willingness," which opens the gate for us to make another choice now.

In short, it becomes very clear in this book why mixing the two models arbitrarily really does not help anybody, because it muddies up either thought system. This little book is extremely helpful in clarifying the issues in a very elegant way. On another level it is a lesson in tolerance, where it simply becomes worthwhile to learn to understand another thought system and understand it for what it is, for that kind of freedom is loving and natural when we have no investment in the world. Whenever we can do these things in such an even handed manner, we will find ourselves where we are able to agree to disagree, and can simply be honestly curious about understanding another, and can enjoy better relations as a result. We learn to live with differences, not in the ego's way of conveniently ignoring inconvenient facts, which trip us up later, but because we have no investment in differences. Norris Clarke certainly represents Christianity in a very appealing way, and amazingly sometimes wanders very close to the Course in his appreciation, but eventually the unbridgeable differences remain.

One thing you will not find here is the perspective of the pre-Christian Jesus tradition, such as the Thomas Gospel, which in recent years has shown us that the traditional Christian point of view is not compatible with the teachings of Jesus either. When properly seen, the study of Thomas and some of the other pre-Christian literature, which was excluded from the Bible - although Thomas was quoted throughout - puts us on an entirely different track, where the Bible falls apart into a collection of books, that we can then appreciate more selectively as literature, and no longer as the monolithic Word of God. Along those lines we would end up placing a lot of "apocryphal" literature on a level with some of the books of the biblical canon, if not sometimes even give them preference as being more likely unadulterated, or closer to the source. In that respect it is worth noting that none of the "Christian" positions and theology as are investigated in this book and represented by Norris Clarke, can trace their origins to the pre-Pauline Jesus literature such as Thomas and Q.

Personally, I have essentially always been inclined to look at the Bible as simply a significant book, and with the respect that is due the holy book of any tradition, but with inconsistent qualities, and particularly have usually ignored Paul in my readings, but I hasten to add that I have also realized more profoundly as I work with the Course how that "Christian"/Newtonian - and would be "Biblical" - model of the world is ingrained in us as part of the ego thought system. So learning to tell the two apart in all their forms is helpful in learning to understand the Course, and learning what it teaches. I have thus come to regard Paul as the exemplar of the ego's strategy of bringing Jesus into the world, or, in the Course's language, bringing the solution to the problem, i.e. trying to fix the world, whereas the Course advocates bringing the problem to the solution, returning to the mind, where Jesus is present to us, and asking for his vision, in lieu of our own mistaken perceptions, as the only possible way out of problems that are of our own making - our own projections.

Again, looking at this purely from a personal standpoint, it boggles my mind when I read Norris Clarke's accounts of what Christians believe, and it really gets kind of funny for me. For most of my life I would have said that I believed in Jesus, but I wasn't a Christian. My understanding of him would have been closer to the symbolic view in ACIM:T-19.IV.C.10, where the birth of Jesus is equated to the beginning of an inner spiritual awakening. As a kid, I was brought up with the notion that the birth of Jesus was just symbolic of the inner events of spiritual awakening. And his baptism in the River Jordan under John the Baptist symbolic of spiritual awakening. By the same token however, until the Course came along in my life, I was never clear on the underlying content of the ego thought system, even though I looked on Christians as a primitive tribe, doomed to die out as they became more and more irrelevant - for in my native Holland people were leaving the churches in droves when I grew up, going from 90% church attendance at the time of my birth to under 10% by the time I emigrated to the USA some 29 years later.

Looking back today, I see how I had taken leave of Christianity, without much clarity about the thought system it stood for or my own subtle investment in it - although I never believed in his dying for our sins, and was taught early on to see that particular theological slight of hand as a sneaky attempt of the ego to have our cake and eat it too, or if you will, to get away with murder. But again, it was not until I met the Course that sorting out the ego thought system began in earnest, and this book is destined to be a classic which untangles the underlying concepts and prevents the confusion that results if people read no further than some superficial resemblances. From that standpoint it is equally helpful to a church pondering if it should include the Course in the liturgy - it should not - to a Course student who is befuddled by the sometimes Christian sounding language - no, this is not your grandfather's Jesus speaking. Regardless of what your faith may be, clarity can only be helpful, and attempts at being inclusive at the price of lost meaning help no one. You can only pour so much water in the wine and still call it wine. After all, " Jeder soll nach seiner fasson selig werden," as the Prussian King Frederick II put it (Everyone should become happy after their own fashion).

e-books are here

2011-02-05T13:20:00.000-05:00

Oh well, I woke up to the fact that e-books are real when I was given an e-book reader at Xmas... and realized it was handier than I had assumed.

The reader is the Literati Reader and it has not been well received by reviewers, seemingly mostly because they reviewed early versions before Xmas, and presently the device has been upgraded significantly, and I have to say it is pretty nifty. I also found I liked it for ideological reasons because the main formats it supports are EPUB and ADOBE Digital Editions, aka ADOBE DRM, which are to all intents and purposes the main open formats that operate cross platforms. The proprietary formats such as Sony, Amazon Kindle, and Barnes and Noble's Nook are doing their level best to keep their users walled-in, an approach which I believe is doomed.
And, if you're in doubt about e-readers, currently, Bed Bath and Beyond has a clearance sale on this device for just $39.99, so that will be a perfect chance to experiment, and you won't lose out because the EPUB/Adobe DRM formats are universal, so you'll still be able to read them if you get another e-reader later:
http://www.bedbathandbeyond.com/Product.asp?SKU=17494791&amp. Further once you register on the BBB website, they'll send you one of their fantabulous 20% off coupons, so now, for $32 you have your starter e-reader, and then later, when you decide you need a fancier one you can move up to something more advanced.

Then there was the recent announcement that A Course in Miracles is now starting to appear in e-book formats, although unfortunately they started out with support only for proprietary formats, Sony, Kindle, Amazon - when it would have been easier to use the above formats, which run across all readers.

Then I found out that my publisher has taken the plunge, and came out of the gate with support for EPUB, Kindle, and Nook, with Google on the way. Here they are:

EPUB/Adobe DRM:
http://www.kobobooks.com/ebook/Closing-The-Circle-Pursahs-Gospel/book-fSmQ4BxPdEWNLxA9f9twhw/page1.html
B&N Nook:
http://search.barnesandnoble.com/Closing-the-Circle/Rogier-Fentener-van-Vlissingen/e/9781846946271/?itm=2&USRI=closing+the+circle
Kindle:
So, now it is for real, the rest is the format wars all over again, though this time it won't be as much of a cliff hanger as was the Betamax/VHS battle.

And, now that I'm used to it, I'm realizing this technology is a real convenience.

I don't have to have all these bookshelves, though I like books, and see myself keeping some but I'll become much more selective.

With my publisher I've had an ongoing argument that their whole strategy was wrong, trying to produce low quality, low cost books for a niche markets. I've argued with him for years that the cheap reader is going to go for the e-book so that the remaining buyers of physical books will want a quality edition. I am hoping to accomplish that with the upcoming 2nd edition of the book. No questions, please, with the upcoming 2nd edition I mean to say that some time in the next twenty years I'll revise the book enough to warrant a 2nd edition, but don't ask me when that will be.

Lastly, for all of you who have struggled with e-book formats, there is help in a crossplatform tool for managing e-books, Calibre e-Book Manager

One thing I realized once I had the e-reader is that there were a few e-books on my PC, but I never read them, because I spent enough time at the PC already. Therefore, once I was able to take them on the bus courtesy of my e-reader, everything changed, and I suddenly read them.

The second major realization was that some books, such as Edward Gibbons' The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, are must-reads which you never read, even if you own them, because they are so bulky.

In short, I'm sold, and I'm convinced that e-readers have arrived, even The New York Times has noticed:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/05/books/05ebooks.html
... and that's the home of "all the news that's fit to print."

Gary in the News Again?

2010-04-21T13:47:00.000-04:00

All terms are potentially controversial, and those who seek controversy will find it. 2 Yet those who seek clarification will find it as well. 3 They must, however, be willing to overlook controversy, recognizing that it is a defense against truth in the form of a delaying maneuver. 4 Theological considerations as such are necessarily controversial, since they depend on belief and can therefore be accepted or rejected. 5 A universal theology is impossible, but a universal experience is not only possible but necessary. 6 It is this experience toward which the course is directed. 7 Here alone consistency becomes possible because here alone uncertainty ends. (ACIM:C-in.2)

Spring has sprung, and criticism of Gary's work is circulating again, and once more in connection with the Circle of Atonement. Yet another author with new material on Thomas has come on the air, one Bruce F. MacDonald, Ph.D. His Thomas book can be found here: The Thomas Book, and his unfortunate criticism of Gary's work is here: Bruce MacDonald's contentions on "GaryRenard's Stolen Gospel". Predictably, a number of people have come to me in recent days for comment on this material, because of my own book on the subject - to which this blog is dedicated. (I am slowly moving my material here, from my Xanga blog at http://rogierfvv.xanga.com.)

Curiously, the author relies once again on the discredited journalistic drive-by shooting that appeared in the form of a series of articles in Miracles Magazine a few years ago, for which to my knowledge at least Jon Mundy, the publisher of said magazine, has publicly apologized at one point. I have perused the website on MacDonald's book a bit, and it seems to me that he comes from a very different frame of reference than Gary does, and it's not clear to me what purpose could possibly be served by his pretty pointless accusation of plagiarism. Simply put, it is very hard to be original in these types of translations, and I say that after following Thomas translations in 4 languages for the past 40 years. You either believe Gary's explanation of how he received the translated text which is published in his books, or you don't. That much is a personal decision. I will have no truck with any one who chooses not to believe Gary's story, but it does not overly bother me either. To each his own, I simply am not interested in the controversy. For me at least, this gratuitous attack on Gary hardly enhances the credibility of what the book might have to say. On the most practical level, it simply represents another viewpoint, and if disbelief in Gary's work is part of that viewpoint, so be it.

Almost every word choice and turn of phrase in the Pursah version could be traced to one translation or another, and I have most of them here on my shelf, and have studied those differences in the process of writing my book. However it was my conclusion at the time of writing my book, that it was pointless to study a comparison of the Pursah material with the historical texts, except to become aware of when she makes deliberate changes, or offers unique and different word choices. In other words, the informational value is in the deliberate differences, not in the parts that are the same as, or similar to other translations. Prior to the appearance of Gary Renard's Your Immortal Reality, Gary once told me that Pursah's favorite translation was actually Meyer's own translation, and NOT the one he did with Patterson. Be that as it may, the controversy seems pretty petty to me. Either you believe Gary's story or you don't, and the need to pick an argument with him has little to do with the content of his books. By the same token, MacDonald's book may contain valuable information for some people, regardless of the controversy, it does however simply come from a totally different frame of reference than does the Course. I see no need to make a fuss over that.

Looking at the Pursah material as Gary has published it, and the way she frames her historical argument on the state of the text, her point is that some of the Logia are more corrupted than others. It is in line with that observation that I would suggest to pay attention to the informational value of when Pursah chooses to make different choices than the standard text, and/or different choices in terms of the translation. The material contribution that the Pursah text makes in that regard consists of the dismissal of about one third of the collection which we have in the form of the Nag Hammadi text (which dated from the 4th century CE), which she declares to be corrupted beyond all recognition. For the rest of the material she simply thinks that some of it was transmitted to us relatively unscathed, and in that respect it makes complete sense that the only possible issue could be about a word choice here or there, but in some instances she makes some very interesting edits, which amount to a correction of the historical Thomas text tradition. Her criticism is entirely focused on the reliability of the Nag Hammadi text tradition, and not so much on the translations, although, again, she makes some interesting word choices here and there.

Aside from the above, which makes sense if you choose to believe it, and no sense at all if you don't, there is really very little to say about this matter. From a standpoint of the Course, there is really nothing else to it, except that it may be another forgiveness opportunity for some, or simply random noise for others. I would doubt if it is worth anybody's while to really track down word for word where every word choice in Pursah's version occurs in the translated material based on the historical text. Of course, Meyer and Patterson might decide to sue Pursah for plagiarism, and call Bruce MacDonald as an expert witness, who knows.

On yet another level, we might keep in mind that the entire Coptic language, which died out in ca. the 7th century CE, consists of a couple of hundred books, a few dictionaries, and a couple of hundred modern scholars arguing over the fine points. So how easy would it be to come up with yet another original new translation after forty years? Not very, and sameness and hairsplitting differences tend to prevail except for some fancy translations which are highly interpretive. Along those lines, I feel that the Meyer/Paterson translation is about the most neutral version that's out there, in other words, if you weren't consciously trying to be unique and different, you would end up with something along the lines of that translation. The point is to address the content, and that is what Pursah's version does, never mind if you agree with it or not. And again, she states clearly that some of the Logia were pretty much in tact, so a high degree of correspondence with existing translations is to be expected. The crux of her argument is about the whole that emerges with her edits, starting with paring back the collection from 114 to 70/71, and then doing some further edits, some of which are pretty drastic and thought provoking. She is not trying to fix what isn't broken, which is exactly the temptation that exists for translators who have to somehow prove their originality.

Lastly, seen with the Course in mind, the accusation of plagiarism is a classic ego ploy. The ego is a second stringer by definition, for it is the thought: "What if I could play God by myself?" And since projection is the primary defense, it will therefore always accuse everyone else of plagiarism. Somehow magically believing that this way it will get away with it, that nobody will notice that it is the very ego thought itself which was not original at all. This is merely the archetypical pattern of blaming others for what we secretly accuse ourselves of, and as experience will show us, projection will not solve the problem, but it perversely reinforces the cycle of sin, guilt, and fear, and keeps us in the ego's hell. Once we recognize it for what it is and instead of defending it, we turn it over to the Holy Spirit, it becomes instead a step on the way Home to Heaven, a miracle, that brings us closer to accepting the atonement for ourselves. Conversely, it is a call for Love, and thus another failed attempt to hide the self-accusation of utter un-originality of the ego, and worse, that nothing really happened, that the thought did not even accomplish anything, which is the essence of Salvation, of accepting the atonement for ourselves.

Meanwhile, in other news, as seen this morning in my travels in the Fordham section of the Bronx, I saw on the safety helmet of a construction worker the following summary:

1 cross
3 nails +
----------
4 given

Of course it's up to us if we want to spend our time with the cross and the nails or with the forgiveness.

The Gnostic Discoveries

2010-02-26T23:22:00.000-05:00

It seems that in this blog sofar, I have effectively discussed all the books I've referred to in Closing the Circle except this one. So it's time to correct this oversight. I think it is healthy to begin to realize the shift in perception that the discoveries at Nag Hammadi are bringing about, even though they are still very slow to become generally felt. Evidently the Christian construction of Jesus has staying power, because it has become so culturally dominant, but perhaps more importantly because the Christian concept of Jesus as the vicarious savior lets us off the hook - we can have our cake and eat it too - while the original teachings of Jesus ask us very pointedly to take responsibility for our lives (take up our cross), and follow him. Evidently the Christian model has much greater appeal.

The trap presented by the whole thing is that from the Christian fantasies of Jesus, we are then liable to move into a "better informed" position on "the real historical Jesus." We will then have accomplished nothing, merely shifted from one picture of Jesus to another picture of Jesus, which equally serves as a substitute for the experience of him. A careful reading of the Thomas Gospel, and even the canonical gospels, and most certainly A Course in Miracles, makes it clear that Jesus is not about theology, but about practicing his teachings and applying them to our lives.
Seen from that point of view, the value of the Nag Hammadi discoveries lies in the mere fact that they upset the applecart, and the symbolism of that is absolutely precious. The books were buried by some priest in an out of the way monastery right at the time that the Canon of the New Testament was decided on, which was a highly partisan selection process of what literature was considered "proper" for Christians, and much else was prosecuted, banned, and often destroyed. And then 1600 years later, after a major world conflagration, and about 20 years prior to Vatican II, where Catholics were set free in the area of Bible studies, voilà this treasure trove turns up again.

Meyer gives a very readable and in depth account of the history of the discovery and the impact of the books. For anyone who wants to understand the context, this is a very helpful introduction, and Marvin Meyer is not too biased in the traditional Christian mold, though I would suggest he has a little too much of a gnostic bias to my taste. Jesus was not a gnostic, even though he did say numerous things which were later expanded upon in the gnostic tradition, and to that extent, he often sounds more gnostic than Christian, but that does not make him a gnostic per se, just as much as he was not a Christian.

Thoughts on Autism

2009-06-30T21:34:00.000-04:00

If all else fails consult the manual, or, if you're on the web, and at a loss for answers, consult Wikipedia, here on Autism. What stands out to me immediately are key phrases such as: "how this occurs is not understood." Priceless. Meanwhile, they know it's a brain disorder, even though they don't understand how it happens, and nobody knows how meat thinks. So if you don't know how it happens, how can you know it's a brain disorder? Ah, the mysteries of modern medicine...
To clarify my sentiments a bit further, I'm the son of a psychiatrist, older brother of a youngest sister, who has symptoms "somewhat like autism," while however reams of psychiatrists, child- and otherwise, could never agree on what the exact classification of her symptoms was. My father raised me with a healthy dose of skepticism about the tenets of Western medicine. His own inability to deal with this issue in his own family undoubtedly was a living concern for him, and focused his mind on the limits of the would-be science of medicine.

What I remember is that my little sister was the center of all that happened in the family. Also, that there were many years when communication seemed to take place, even though she never learned to speak, but she had a terrific sense of humor and would laugh at the right times. She also had a great sense for people, and when my very bitter grandmother on my father's side would visit, she was guaranteed to cry all day until the woman left. One way or another she was the center of family life, and actually a joy to be around, though her needs of course had a tendency to impose a certain structure on those around her. In all it was always manageable to care for her at home, in particular since my father had his practice at home, and there was always help on that account. But the little sister was the center of family life.

Besides the experience of seeing all these brilliant doctors, my father's colleagues, who were all non-plussed by what the exact issue was with my sister, I think we mostly felt that she was a blessing, and the mostly non-verbal communication with her added a dimension to family life, which otherwise might have been much more fractious, and splintered completely earlier than it did. Having said that, I tend to think there was an element of subconscious blame games between my parents, and a practical development in which I tend to think that my mother in particular developed some saintly pretenses that the Lord had called her to devote her life to the care of this child, which began to take the place of her previous calling to support my father in his practice, and so I suspect that her total attention shifted to the child, who was placed on a pedestal as some sort of an angel, and the net effect of that may have been that my father was being frozen out and in retrospect it seems that by the time I was about 14 or 15 years old, there was a freeze in relations which ultimately led to a divorce, with my mother persisting in her saintly role, and never taking any responsibility for her part in changing the dynamics of the relationship, by de facto elevating her mother role to sainthood, at the expense of her wife-role. Needless to say it all exploded into complete and utter misunderstanding and an all around breakdown of family communications for the rest of our lives, with the little sister ending up in an institution, gradually deteriorating, and seemingly no longer really recognizing anyone of us.

In ca. ' 96/'98 I studied A Course in Miracles for some time with a brilliant family therapist in Riverdale, who was then in her late 70's and 80's and really had a lifetime's worth of experience. Along with what I was learning of how the mind really works from the Course, it was also her understanding of family dynamics which gave me new clues about the situation I grew up in, or at least a different way to look at it. Fundamentally her insight was that a family unit often times is a demonstration that the mind really is one, which all of us don't want to know, and therefore hate each other all the more, particularly because we really see ourselves in the other, and this effect is of course the strongest within the family unit. It was through her questioning that I became hip to the dynamic of my mother's making the child the absolute center of her life, and freezing out my father, and one thing that put me on to this was her probing into my own early puberty, and the notion that children often act out wildly if there is unspoken disharmony between the parents, and gradually I began to see a pattern. And so where on the surface it seemed that it was my father who became unfaithful, then it became clearer to me that there were other roots of the problem. And again on the whole it became very insightful to me to see how a family really is a dynamic system, that is truly one on a level that none of them consciously do understand or even want to understand. My ex-wife had an intuitive grasp of this, and an expression, namely, "everyone always knows everything." And this is very true, and it's threatening to us. Yet then there are paths like the Course, where the notion that the mind is one is brought out with great insight, and you begin to fathom that it is unnatural for minds not to communicate, but that the choice for the ego really entails a purposive breakdown of communications, which is a necessary expedient for the individual to prove itself, and as such simply part of the experience here in this life. However once we can look at this with some more disengagement, healing may become possible. And now it is about forgiveness, and recognizing that the issue is not whether the autism (or whatever it is) of my little sister could ever be healed (small chance later in life, when decline has set in), or could have been healed, if only... (blame game), but to forgive myself for the inherent "autism" that represents the basic choice for the ego, and its illusion of a life separated from our source. If you read the descriptions of autism that way, and begin to forgive yourself, perhaps things can start to change.

At that stage, we can start to move beyond a lot of nonsense, and blame games, and simply recognize that the choice of being mentally handicapped, retarded, or autistic, a criminal, or whatever, is merely yet another form of acting out the separation, and therefore an opportunity to forgive ourselves for the "tiny, mad idea" in the growing awareness that we have the option to make another choice and that our brothers are actually our teachers who help us learn to make that other choice, when we're ready. Now changing anyone outside ourselves is no longer necessary, for the only thing we can change is our self. So all the attempts to heal and fix everybody around us are then recognized as part of the insanity of the dream of separation, and we can focus on simply doing the most loving thing, and that begins with forgiving, forgiving, and more forgiving, and then we'll know what you do or don't need to do as the most loving thing in the world, including how to deal with a "mentally disadvantaged" sibling or child. For our natural inclination in our attempts to "help," are usually little else but ways of trying to remake our brothers in our own image, which we immodestly presume to be "healthy" and "normal," and thereby we miss out on the opportunity for healing ourselves, by keeping the problem outside of us, in someone else.

It is no sacrifice that he be saved, for by his freedom will you gain your own. To let his function be fulfilled is but the means to let yours be. And so you walk toward Heaven or toward hell, but not alone. How beautiful his sinlessness will be when you perceive it! And how great will be your joy, when he is free to offer you the gift of sight God gave to him for you! He has no need but this; that you allow him freedom to complete the task God gave to him. Remembering but this; that what he does you do, along with him. And as you see him, so do you define the function he will have for you, until you see him differently and let him be what God appointed that he be to you. (ACIM:T-25.V.5)

The Greatest Cop-out in the World

2009-06-28T21:29:00.000-04:00

The Devil made me do it.
God made me do it.
I was guided to do it.
In hoc signo vinces. (In this sign you will conquer)
Ich hab' es nicht gewusst. (I didn't know it.)
I was just following orders.

To which my answer always is that my mother was always certain that she was channeling the Lord Almighty directly when she was telling me to eat my spinach. The ego has more ways of recruiting God to its cause than you can shake a stick at. But these are the dynamics of guilt, manipulation and intimidation.

The Devil made me do it, is the easiest cop-out in the world, and it is in fact a way of objectivizing the ego thought of separation into an external force, personalized as the Devil, which can make me do anything at all. This is entirely part of the paranoid-schizophrenic mode of operating which is the basis of all ego psychology. It projects the cause for my behavior outside of me, so that I have somebody else to blame for my actions. As Ken Wapnick always says, the first scream of a child really means: "I didn't do it!" It's my parents' fault, they made love and caused me to get born. So from day one we set it up so we appear to be the guiltless victim of the world, no wonder then that we use such a principle in our defense whenever convenient.

God made me do it. This one is the same thing in reverse. This time it is about something that has some social merit, for which I like to claim credit, but I show my magnanimity by praising God, and staying on his good side in the process. I also give myself more authority in the process.

I was guided to do it. The answer to that one is in Ken Wapnick's repeated saying that we're always channeling someone, either the ego or the Holy Spirit. And the rest of it is: you'll only know which by seeing how peaceful you are. By the same token, mentioning to your interlocutor that you "feel guided" is only a subtle intimidation attempt, like my mother about the spinach, by appealing to a higher authority, which is supposed to impress them. It's guilt and manipulation at work.

In hoc signo vinces. That was the famous message which the Emperor Constantine saw in his dream, frequently cited by Christians as a symbol of the success of Christianity, when it was of course only the complete inversion of the teachings of Jesus.

Ich hab' es nicht gewusst. That is the famous pleading of the Nazi war criminals at Neurenberg, and it is the perfect corollary to every form of accusing some cause outside of us, and taking no responsibility personally. It is countered by the well understood principle that ignorance of the law is no excuse. It goes hand in hand with the next one.

I was just following orders. Even under military law a soldier remains responsible if his orders are a violation of the law. The same goes in the corporate world. Nice try, but try telling it to the judge. The problem is the same: "To thine own self be true!" The question is which self?

The bottom line is these are all different forms of the same basic cop-out, and we are responsible for our actions, and more importantly for our thoughts, which lead to the actions.

God, as he is seen in the Course, as our Source, like also Jesus' teachings say in their original form, is only our loving Father, who created us as spirit, as the extension of his oneness, still always part of him. We then dreamed up a world and a body as the expression of the ego thought of separation, an imaginary dream life outside of the Oneness of Heaven. Then we make up a God who we accuse of making the world, so again we're off the hook. And we have him throw us out of paradise, making him the heavy in that story too. All of this serves the purpose of escaping responsibility for our thoughts, and covering over the power of our mind. The teachings of the Kingdom as something that is within us, and everywhere around us, except we don't see it, is exactly about that power of the mind, and responsibility for our thoughts, as is the notion of the faith that moves mountains. Our belief in the world of time and space is only the reflection of our belief in separation, and when that belief is healed completely there is no world. Only our belief in the separation upholds it.

There is no world apart from what you wish, and herein lies your ultimate release. Change but your mind on what you want to see, and all the world must change accordingly. Ideas leave not their source. This central theme is often stated in the text, and must be borne in mind if you would understand the lesson for today. It is not pride which tells you that you made the world you see, and that it changes as you change your mind.
But it is pride that argues you have come into a world quite separate from yourself, impervious to what you think, and quite apart from what you chance to think it is. There is no world! This is the central thought the course attempts to teach. Not everyone is ready to accept it, and each one must go as far as he can let himself be led along the road to truth. He will return and go still farther, or perhaps step back a while and then return again. (ACIM:W-132.5-6)

Seen from this point of view, taking responsibility for our mind includes taking responsibility for the world we chose to see, chose to see by our belief in the ego thought system where we believe ourselves to be separate from God. And so we see a world of murder and mayhem, because we believe in a thought system of murder, of separation from our Source. The correction is the thought system of the Holy Spirit, and Jesus' teaching of forgiveness is the bridge from one to the other.

God, Is That The Word

2009-06-24T21:32:00.000-04:00

Joe Croker sends me this song about Thomas, and I'm reproducing the text here, as well as his Biblical references.

God, Is That The Word?
By Joe Croker

Peaches and plums -- ripe them up distant sun, burning empty eye
Old men saw God inside, but even you will die -- even you will die
Burst and turn to stone: white dwarf or black little hole
Peaches and plums -- get sweet then they come undone

Look up in the sky -- Orion burns, galactic eye … galaxy so wide
White silk spread in the black of night, it’s

God, is that the word? Is that the word? God, is that the word?

Sometimes late at night in the warm pool of my little mind
The softest colors glow -- somehow everything I know
I’m just a little boy -- so at home, so unmoored -- it’s

God, yeah that's the word. That's the word? God that's the word.

Thomas wanted the bloody cloths, the fingers in the wounds
The Lord appears, no one swoons … deceptively mundane
Sort of like most everything, but he’s

God, is that the word? That's the word -- that's the word.
God, is that the word?
Or is that absurd?

Tackle, trim, bridle, bit: the long-haired mare, girl riding it
On into the barn … undress upon the straw
You’re so pure, you got it all, it’s

God …

•

John 20:24-29
John 20:24    But Thomas, one of the twelve, called Didymus, was not with them when Jesus came.

John 20:25    The other disciples therefore said unto him, We have seen the Lord. But he said unto them, Except I shall see in his hands the print of the nails, and put my finger into the print of the nails, and thrust my hand into his side, I will not believe.

John 20:26   And after eight days again his disciples were within, and Thomas with them: then came Jesus, the doors being shut, and stood in the midst, and said, Peace be unto you.

John 20:27   Then saith he to Thomas, reach hither thy finger, and behold my hands; and reach hither thy hand, and thrust it into my side: and be not faithless, but believing.

John 20:28   And Thomas answered and said unto him, My Lord and my God.

John 20:29   Jesus saith unto him, Thomas, because thou hast seen me, thou hast believed: blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed.

And, of course you can buy his album at the ITunes store
http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewAlbum?id=287193905&s=1434

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Some notes to the above.

No doubt Thomas was "on" to the fact that Jesus was inside, not out, that the Kingdom was inside, not outside, etc., based on the material in the Thomas Gospel, and the song reflects that. The quotes from the Gospel of John show the caricature of Thomas, in the Gospel stories, and it is dubious if that was about the real Thomas or just made up for effect.

The Thomas character in the Johannine tradition is "the doubting Thomas," who represents all of us in a way, portraying the sign of Virgo, and insisting in typical ego manner that form comes before content, or that unless I see the physical proof, I won't believe anything, which turns things on their head. The cause is in the mind, and physical reality is but a reflection of that, and not the other way around, as the Virgo characteristic wants to believe. Since we weren't there, we won't know, but it might be that the "historical" Thomas was in fact this doubter at times and a real Virgo, however, if so, he certainly did learn the message of Jesus later in life to be able to compose the Thomas Gospel as we know it. In that case maybe he once was the doubting Thomas, who later outgrew his doubts. The beatification "pure of heart" who shall "see" God is of course the outcome of those who overcome exactly these doubts, and then, in accepting the atonement for ourselves, which is the completion of the forgiveness process, we would come to "see," i.e. experience God. (notes on the astrological nature of the Thomas character based on J.W. Kaiser, Beleving van het Evangelie, Uitg. Synthese, (p. 216-217). The word the Course tends to use for this "seeing" is vision, which again has nothing to do with the physical eyes, but everything with the question of with whom we are doing the seeing. With the ego we will always see the world of separation, with the Holy Spirit we will "see" the universe of Love.

Explanation re Gary Renard's Guided Meditation

2009-06-22T21:24:00.000-04:00

This picture is of Gary Renard in Amsterdam, at the Amstelkerk, on 23 May 2009, this was not necessarily the moment when he explained the meditation, though he did talk about it that day.

As a further clarification of the meditation, it was recorded by Gene Bogart, who records Gary's regular podcast. It is also described in Gary's books. My book Closing the Circle, to which this blog is dedicated, is in turn based on Gary's work.

Here then is Gary Renard's Guided Meditation

On Islam -- Happy Father's Day

2009-06-21T21:19:00.000-04:00

Surrender is the most difficult thing to the ego to understand, because it is totally invested in what ACIM calls fighting God for His Authorship. We want to be original, and we want to be right, but (un)fortunately we are neither. While formal religions have little appeal for me, and Islam is no exception, I've often found solace with some of the Sufi wise men, from the ridiculous, like Mullah Nasruddin, to the sublime, like Rumi, or Tierno Bokar, and I've sometimes found beautiful and profound verses in the Qur'an (my favorite edition listed hereby). But most of all, the very word Islam is what inspires me, and I recognize in it the first step in the forgiveness process as A Course in Miracles teaches it.

Islam means surrender, and the very first step of the forgiveness process in the Course, is really to surrender the arrogance of the ego, and to open myself up to the possibility that maybe, just maybe Jesus could be right and I could be wrong. As long as I stubbornly maintain that I'm right, I cannot ever take back the projection of guilt on others and ask for help. And the miracle lies exactly in the fact that a shift, a change of mind is possible, by asking for guidance from the Holy Spirit and the right mind, in lieu of from our ego, which got us into trouble in the first place. As a refresher here are the three steps of forgiveness, the way out of conflict any time you see yourself getting stuck (again!):

"Would I accuse myself of doing this?" I.e. this means to question the validity of the ego's perception that some SOB out there is making my life miserable, and instead to entertain the notion that I might have something to do with it, and that what I'm accusing the other of is, in some different form, a secret self-accusation. Here is an applicable quote from the Course:
"Forgiveness should be practiced through the day, for there will still be many times when you forget its meaning and attack yourself. When this occurs, allow your mind to see through this illusion as you tell yourself:

Let me perceive forgiveness as it is. Would I accuse myself of doing this? I will not lay this chain upon myself. (ACIM:W-134.17:1-5)
In other words, at this point I've taken my projection back, and because now the problem is not outside of me (where I cannot change it), but inside of me, so that I can now change it. And the way to change it is with a change of mind, what Jesus calls metanoia in the Greek of the New Testament.
Now comes the only decision, the only exercise of free will ever, having raised the ego's guidance to doubt, we are now free to ask for the guidance of the Holy Spirit, and in the process freed ourselves from the ridiculous chains of having to know everything, or, more accurately, having to pretend to know everything, for now we have deferred judgment, and we are asking for Help from the one who does know everything, the Holy Spirit. The point of surrender lies in what the Course calls 'looking at the problem as it is' (ACIM:T-27.VII.2:2) and that passage continues with: 'and not the way that you have set it up.' Thus what we are surrendering is our problem definition, which then opens the way for the solution to arise. The ego would tenaciously hang on to the problem, because this defines its separate identity.
Now we leave it to the Holy Spirit. And what we learn subsequently is that it is not a sacrifice to surrender our judgment (or should we say our stupidity?) to Him, but it is the way out of the ego's Hell.

The guided meditation which Gary Renard offers in his workshops and books is also a beautiful way of reinforcing the forgiveness process, by starting and ending your day with a brief meditation in which you visualize a white light (God's Love) which slowly surrounds you, and you lay on the altar as your gifts to him all your childish definitions of what the problems are, and what the answers should be, thus making room for the Answer to show up, instead of continuing to kill yourself with thinking it's my way or the highway. Once you let go of those ego shackles, you can totally submerse yourself in the experience of God's Love surrounding you. This is the way to accepting the sonship, to seeking the second place to gain the first, to realizing that no-one comes to the father but through me - not Jesus as a person, but the manifestation of the Sonship as he realized it, and demonstrated it. The prodigal son, re-becomes the Son, by letting go of his plan for salvation, and accepting anew the Sonship as the only fulfillment possibility. In the end then, it is for the mind to let go of its mistaken belief in the ego, for the ego isn't anything except a mis-thought, a tiny mad idea, that makes us very unhappy as long as we maintain our allegiance to it, and waste our days in justifying it. Happy Father's day.

Logion 42 and Enlightenment

2009-06-18T21:17:00.000-04:00

Logion 42, "Be passersby," although it is in the middle of the collection may be the punch line of the entire Thomas Gospel. For to learn the view from "above the battleground" as the Course calls it, is to wake up from the dream.

Those with the strength of God in their awareness could never think of battle. What could they gain but loss of their perfection? For everything fought for on the battleground is of the body; something it seems to offer or to own. No one who knows that he has everything could seek for limitation, nor could he value the body's offerings. The senselessness of conquest is quite apparent from the quiet sphere above the battleground. What can conflict with everything? And what is there that offers less, yet could be wanted more? Who with the Love of God upholding him could find the choice of miracles or murder hard to make? (ACIM:T-23.IV.9)

To get into the fight, means to fully identify with the dream role, i.e. choosing to be asleep. With at least the dawning of an awareness that I'm not my body, that I'm not the role, eventually I can actually play it even better, because I'm no longer so hung up on making it a success, but rather I'm accepting it as my next classroom where I can learn that this is not what I am. That is surely what it means to "follow Jesus," to a "Kingdom not of this world," for in choosing forgiveness, I stop justifying my wrong minded choices, and while I still may make them for a while, they gradually no longer have the power over me that they once had. Very deliberately, the Course states its objective as the achievement of peace of mind, not enlightenment. What the Course is for, is to direct our steps in the right direction, so that like with the old Greek saying that the way to the top of Mt. Olympus is, to make sure every step you take is in that direction, this is what the Course helps us do, to get on the road to Peace. Enlightenment then, is to some time realize that there's nobody there to be enlightened, because we're not even here, that's just a dream we were having. Moreover, as the Course also points out and we are destined to realize sooner or later, we are the dreamer of the dream, and once that sinks in, how could you ever be afraid of all the figures in the dream, because you dreamed them, or be concerned at all for the hero of the dream, once you realize you dreamed him/her too?

Serendipity Strikes - a thought of Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch

2009-06-14T21:14:00.000-04:00

In high school, the Gymnasium Erasmianum in Rotterdam (and yes, it was founded in 1328), I had the joy of taking optional classes of Hebrew in my final two years. The teacher was a professor of Semitic Languages at Utrecht, and this was a side gig for him. The theory behind the program was that those kids who might want to go and study theology, could thus prepare themselves, since in Holland it was expected that any Pastor of a church prepare the texts for the Sunday sermon always from the original languages. I noticed that I had a class full of people who, like me had no interest in studying theology, but who vaguely understood that Jesus was not a Christian, so that to begin with it made more sense to study the Old Testament in the orginal language, instead of relying on translations which were often heavily biased by later Christian theology.
After graduation I sort of fell into a hole where I could not start college because I had to do my military service first, though I became a conscientious objector and did civil service instead for 18 months. While I was waiting for my assignment I made myself useful at the old school by collaborating with said Hebrew teacher as his teaching assistant. The program was that we studied Torah in the 2nd year Hebrew class, in which I would discuss the textst on the basis of a commentary by Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch, while the teacher would discuss grammar and syntax in parallel from a modern linguistic standpoint. I have later had comments back from people who were in that class and loved it. And for me it was certainly the basis for beginning to form more clarity about the fact that Jesus stood in a Jewish context, and that Christianity was a later fabrication, but really an extrapolation, an interpretation, that only cited him in name, but had little to do with his teachings.
Even before my Hebrew studies I had begun to collect Judaica, and read lots of things, and who knows perhaps the first impulse for that was given when at age nine or ten some time my parents had Prof. Martin Buber over for lunch one time, who impressed me greatly. I loved his German translation of the Bible, which he did with Franz Rosenzweig, and by age 16 I had read all of his works. A jewish bookseller, Lampusiak had been following my interest in Judaica, and he sort of became my mentor any time I came browsing his store, and we would have lengthy conversations. Anytime I would want to buy a new book in the realm of rabbinical studies, he would sort of give me his equivalent of a rabbinical exam, before he allowed me to buy the book. When I wanted to buy the commentary on Psalms from S.R. Hirsch at the end of my last year of highschool, he made me come back several times before he was satisfied that I knew enough to read it. Subsequently that summer, I bought Hirsch's commentary on the Pentateuch (Torah), in Amsterdam at De Pampiere Waereld, which was an antiquarian bookseller of world-wide fame. I realized the reason these books were so prized was that they were the last few copies of the original editions that had survived the Holocaust. The edition on Psalms still even had the original binding, but the Pentateuch had suffered the fate of many books during the war, when people tore the covers off, so you could not see the titles, and it was hoped that thus the Nazi's would not see that they were Hebrew books, and pick them up to be burned.
Over time my interest in Hebrew studies lessened. And at one point in time, in 1997, I donated a good deal of my library to the Foundation for A Course in Miracles, at that time in Roscoe, New York. My editions of S. R. Hirsch went along, if nothing else because I knew that Ken Wapnick, being a good Jewish boy from Brooklyn, although gone astray in his mother's eyes, would appreciate them. Then in 2000 when the foundation was going to move to its present location at Temecula, CA, Ken called me and said they could not move the books to the new location, so did I want my books back. Ever since then I've had numerous moves, sold and given away a lot of books, but S.R. Hirsch's books stayed with me and I kept asking around to either sell them to a good dealer of Judaica, where I would be assured they'd find a dignified home, or give them to someone who truly would value them.
Fast forward to June 12th of 2009, and I had some business dealings with a lady with last name - you guessed it Hirsch. So spontaneously, I asked her if she was related. Yes indeed, she was a descendant. And so I asked her, how would she like to own an original edition of the works of Samson Raphael Hirsch. She loved it, and I knew these books had at long last found the loving home they deserved.
It gets even funnier. During the same week I was contacted via Facebook, by a distant niece, daughter of my much-reviled grand-uncle Henri Louis ("Hein"). She grew up in Switserland and lives in Montreal, and during a phone conversation was able to explain to me that the Fentener side of my family were Jewish merchants and mariners in the 16th century. I shared with her that in grade school I was friends with a jewish girl, and her father always cracked himself up, that at any time I always seemed to have several businesses going, and he would slap his knees and say, you've got to have jewish blood! The niece meanwhile seemed to have rather deep insight into the reasons why both artistic and business talents were woven into the traditions of our family and we certainly had a shared interest in the one place where all of this came together in the printing of African cotton by Vlisco, of Helmond, which since ca 1963 is no longer owned by the family, but she and I still feel that it is in our blood somehow, and both seem to have a vivid interest in West African culture.

The Bastards Don't Deserve It... Forgiveness that Is.

2009-06-12T21:13:00.000-04:00

That is Gary Renard's frequent joke, and an important one, for just like Logion 13, it is an important lesson in why Yeshua's teachings are not very popular in the world. Never have been. We want to hang on to our identity, and to do so we must maintain conflict, for personality and individuality are thoughts of hate, that must be fed by maintaining a suitable list of enemies. And so the justification of our righteous anger comes so natural, that we really get blindsided time and again, by those seemingly so honest feeling that it is impossible to forgive, and we do not want to know that we're only killing ourselves with it, that it is the choice for the crucifxion. Hence the Course also says:

Do not make the pathetic error of "clinging to the old rugged cross." The only message of the crucifixion is that you can overcome the cross. Until then you are free to crucify yourself as often as you choose. This is not the gospel I intended to offer you. We have another journey to undertake, and if you will read these lessons carefully they will help prepare you to undertake it. (ACIM:T-4-in.3:7-11)

Forgiveness completely flies in the face of our justified anger, and that is also why the temptation is so great to want to improve on ACIM, and become an "important teacher," rather than learning it yourself, and teaching by learning the Navajo way. The only way to do it is to do it. That is the shortcut (with thanks to Ken Wapnick for that remark). In short the way to be an ACIM teacher in reality is to know you don't matter at all, and it's all a comedy.

Forgiveness, on the other hand, is still, and quietly does nothing. It offends no aspect of reality, nor seeks to twist it to appearances it likes. It merely looks, and waits, and judges not. He who would not forgive must judge, for he must justify his failure to forgive. But he who would forgive himself must learn to welcome truth exactly as it is. (ACIM:T-pII.1.4)

As a little side note, also the speeches of Dutch Queen Juliana in 1952, including when she spoke to the American congress, on her interest in a way out of conflict on a global level, in the concept of the Third Way, which was on her mind in those days, is an example of how the message of peace, the mere thought of it, is anathema to the world. In her case, it would appear that quite possibly her husband, Prince Bernhard, even hatched a plot to have her dethroned, and put his daughter Beatrix on the throne (then just turned 18), all to the greater glory of Lockheed and mutually assured destruction. He of course more than anyone seems to have turned Holland into a banana republic, or rather, an armsdealing republic. It is a story that has not yet been fully told, but some day it will, and it makes for a nice reflection of what the world does really believe in, and why it is the Course says, that the world was made as an attack on God.

The world was made as an attack on God. It symbolizes fear. And what is fear except love's absence? Thus the world was meant to be a place where God could enter not, and where His Son could be apart from Him. Here was perception born, for knowledge could not cause such insane thoughts. But eyes deceive, and ears hear falsely. Now mistakes become quite possible, for certainty has gone. (ACIM:W-pII.3.2)

And again this ties in closely to another theme that runs through the Thomas gospel materials, namely the notion that these are the teachings which Jesus dispenses privately, he did then, and he does now. For only in the forgiveness moments, in the miracle, do we individually become teachable because it means we surrendered our judgment, and so we listen for the first time in a long time. And then quickly we forget it again, because we are deadly afraid of it. So it has nothing to do with the teachings being secret, or Jesus secretive, but it has everything to do that we remain outsiders of the mystery of forgiveness unless and until we practice it, and therein lies the meeting with the Master, that Internal Teacher, who is available to us whenever we really ask his Help, in complete surrender of our own judgment, and constant urge to be right and know better.

ABCs of Forgiveness with Gary Renard

2009-06-09T21:05:00.000-04:00

In this case at the Treehouse annex to the American Book Center (ABC!) in Amsterdam, Holland on May 22nd, 2009.

Here is the Femke's blog, she being the lady who organized this wonderful event. Funny to be speaking in my own country in English! And it was lovely to do this in direct succession to Gary, so it flowed smoothly from one to the other, after all my work is based on his.

2009-06-06T21:01:00.000-04:00

This book is a hilarious parable of what happened in the formation of the religion called Christianity from the teachings of Jesus, by Peter and Paul, regardless of whether you believe its tenets in the literal sense. Its conclusions are at least solid on the spiritual level, for they reflect precisely what the ego will do again and again to distort the teachings of Jesus to mean something entirely different. Jesus warned us of that. It is the reason why the Thomas Gospel speaks of the "hidden" teachings in its introduction, indicating that these were spoken to the apostles personally, but on a spiritual level these are the things Jesus is still teaching and has always taught.

In Logion 13 he also warns us of the resistance of the world to his teachings, ultimately warning Thomas that even his fellow apostles would stone him, if he told them what Jesus taught him personally. These types of things have often been misunderstood, and led the world to glorify martyrdom, etc. which was not the point. Fortunately we have A Course In Miracles today, and it completely revolves around having us understand the psychological dynamic of why the ego does not want to hear the teachings of Jesus. That is for me the context in which I say that I read this book purely as a parable for what happened to transform Jesus's message of inner truth, of restoring our relationship with God, to the worldly religion that became serviceable to the Roman Empire a few centuries hence, and for which one way or another Paul (and also Peter et al.) laid the foundation, regardless of whether you choose to accept the specific points of this book. It is what happened in spirit.

The format of the book is a dialog on the David Letterman show, and the parties are a traditional theologian and an author who thinks Paul was a secret agent for the Romans, whose entire purpose was exactly to put the teachings of Jesus on their head, and co-opt his person (now safely dead) in the service of Caesar. It makes a fun read, even if I would personally find that it is way overboard in certain respects. However it is certainly serves to make the point of just how much Christianity turned the teachings of Jesus on their ear, though the gist of this book seems to be that therefore Jesus is not to be taken seriously either, which is where I feel it goes overboard. So I see this book as a magnificent pun, but I don't take it seriously, for coming from the standpoint of A Course in Miracles as well as the Thomas Gospel, and you'll definitely get a chuckle out of these scenes.

One important aspect of the book, which I do take quite seriously, is that it really exposes just how much we are inclined to look back in history, and project into it what we think today. It is almost impossible not to. This frequently comes to light in things like the books of the Jesus seminar, which is doing so much good work in providing a more objective look at Jesus, yet still very often many of the members of this group continue to write as if Jesus were really a proto-Christian, whereas the only sane conclusion is that Christianity was entirely invented after his death, and he was merely bombarded into one posthumously, and proclaimed to be the founder of Paul's religion, when in fact founding any religion was the last thing he wanted to do.

Unfortunately the second half of the book slides into a very common misinterpretation of Jesus, as your normal supermarket variety revolutionary, a sort of an ancient Che Guevara, which is getting tired by now, and a favorite ploy to deny the truly revolutionary teachings of Jesus. Love and forgiveness are far more revolutionary than cheap violence, but the world has a great stake in not recognizing it, so that mis-casting Jesus as a Che Guevara equivalent actually reduces his teachings to a level of manageable threat.

Beyond Awakening & Logion 5

2009-06-04T20:57:00.000-04:00

This is a wonderful little book, which for one thing, you could read entirely as a commentary on Logion 5 in the Thomas Gospel, which reads as follows (as per usual, in the Pursah rendering from Gary Renard's Your Immortal Reality):

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.

In parallel, we may also think of the following lines from the Course:

Why wait for Heaven? Those who seek the light are merely covering their eyes. The light is in them now. Enlightenment is but a recognition, not a change at all. Light is not of the world, yet you who bear the light in you are alien here as well. The light came with you from your native home, and stayed with you because it is your own. It is the only thing you bring with you from Him Who is your Source. It shines in you because it lights your home, and leads you back to where it came from and you are at home. (ACIM:W-188.1)

In short, this is a good reminder that our journey is, in the Course's words: "It is a journey without distance to a goal that has never changed." (ACIM:T-8.VI.9:7)

In Beyond Awakening - which has nothing to do with the Course - author Jeff Foster speaks of this experience in his own words. As he puts it, it is about the utterly obvious. It is about the insight that the idea of a journey, with a destination, is itself part of the ego's smoke and mirrors deception of thinking that the answers are out there, when the only place where there are any answers. This in and of itself brings notions from the Thomas Gospel like Logion 3 to mind, which is another very strong statement that it isn't out there, be it in the sky, or in the sea, for it is within. Also woven through the book is the notion that whatever I'm involved in right now, is at all times my best learning opportunity, which is another central notion of the Course. It is as lucid an explanation of non-duality as you can find today. It is simple and straightforward and to be recommended highly. More words would hardly add meaning, you'll read it in an afternoon, and enjoy it tremendously. It's a "Duh!" experience in the best sense of the word.

Aeon Byte Interview

2009-05-30T16:20:00.000-04:00

The website Aeon Byte is now starting to promote a recent interview they did with me, which will air over internet radio through the site on 5/30 and 5/31.

It certainly was a fun interview to do, because of the questions the host, Miguel Conner, came up with. He knows the broader background quite well, and this made it interesting, I think because my work is just a smidgeon outside of his "usual fare" - if there is such a thing, for he has a fairly wide range.

Given the topics his show/website covers, his vantage point naturally is gnosticism, and I think it is fairly well a given that A Course in Miracles represents a modern equivalent of gnostic thinking, and many of its students have previously been interested in Gnosis and Gnosticism.

As a critical note, I might add that in certain quarters the fact that Jesus used some terms that were widely used by the Gnostics, foolishly is thought to imply that he was a Gnostic. This is not the case. It is about as logical as saying that I must be a Frenchman because someone heard me speak French. The budding Church of Peter and Paul, which became Christianity, was in the habit of using the term Gnostics as almost the equivalent of heretics, for by that time the emphasis was already starting to shift towards formalizing their version of Jesus's teachings as a religion, as the world understands these things. In other words, for them, it was about the outside of the cup, not the inside, whereas Jesus taught (in the Pursah rendering: ("Why do you wash the outside of the cup? Don't you understand that the one who made the inside, is also the one who made the outside?" - Logion 89) So mainly the difference between what became the orthodox Christianity of Peter and Paul, and the "Gnostic groups" is about seeing the relevance of his teachings on an internal level, as an inner experience of learning the teachings of Jesus, versus the outer religious practice of what became Christianity, which focuses primarily on the outer level, on the words and the behavior. In short, Jesus was not a Gnostic in the narrow sense, but the Gnostics as a group did preserve certain aspects of his teachings which were ignored or actively repressed by the increasingly powerful group around Peter and Paul. Some schools, such as the school of Valentinus did come very close in their understanding to the way we now see his thought system in A Course in Miracles. I believe that it is this circumstance why many people who study the Course in this lifetime, have some form of past-life memories of being around at the time of Jesus, and very often in a gnostic context.

Stand Up Spirituality

2009-05-29T16:20:00.000-04:00

I just returned from Gary Renard's workshop in Amsterdam, on May 22 (booksigning at ABC/Treehouse) and May 23rd (Workshop at the beautiful Amstelkerk), and it was delightful, including the fact that I got to sign some books as well. In the newsletter of his Dutch publishers, Altamira-Becht, there was a terriffic account of the whole workshop, and the writer of same coined a phrase which bears repeating. In a play on Gary's constant stream of jokes, which are sprinkled throughout his otherwise very serious workshop - I guess as a reminder that seriousness causes reincarnation - he dubbed the performance "standup spirituality." Meanwhile Jan Westerhof, a Dutch painter, whose triptych was the background of the presentation, took some pictures and decided that Gary looked a bit like Benny Hill (see picture).

Very much in the spirit of Logion 42, "Be Passersby" and in a play on the Course's notion that we forgot to laugh at the "tiny mad idea," (the thought of separation), Gary peppers his books and his presentations with humor. At the same time, he lets us have a look in the kitchen of his own learning of the Course, through his books and workshops, including numerous "embarrassing" and very "personal" episodes, which is a reflection of his profound understanding that nothing, but nothing in this life is to be taken seriously. The way out of hell is definitely sprinkled with humor, simply from seeing how completely ridiculous the shenanigans of the ego are, quite in the sense of what Ken Wapnick likes to call: "A dysfunctional solutions to a non-existent problem," and we spend most of our energies on dressing it up and making it look very seriously, now that's a laugh.

Moving from a God of Fear to a God of Love

2009-05-17T16:16:00.000-04:00

Gary Renard's 29th podcast, deals with the themes of a different way of looking at our relationship with Jesus. He speaks here about his experience of starting to discover the power of the mind through EST at one point, and he speaks about the Hay House conference, and some of the questions are interesting too about a shift that is beginning to happen within even traditional Christianity. Bishop Carlton Pearson is one example of that, although Gary does not mention him by name, but refers to me mentioning him. Another interesting case is Paul Vieira from Canada, who talks about the notion that Jesus has left the building. The one Gary mentions is Joel Osteen.
Also interesting is that he mentions younger and younger people coming to his workshops. And all the way through the focus is on moving from fear to love. A nice additional point is how Gary addresses that we should use whatever spiritual teachings and paths that work for us, and it makes no difference. At the same time, in the spirit of the Course, if you feel that the Course is the right path for you than stick to it, simply because it works better undiluted.

Stevan Davies on Thomas Sayings in Mark Part II, Unit 4

2009-05-17T16:14:00.000-04:00

This final item from Stevan Davies' second article on the use of the Thomas sayings in Mark, starts with the parallel of Mark 6:1-6 and Logion 31 in Thomas.

Clearly that saying, which may already have had currency as a popular saying in the time of Jesus, points out the obvious that the miracle is is not recognized by the ego context in us, symbolized here as the environment "where we came from" in worldly terms.

In this case certainly the passage in Mark, while significantly expanded from the form the statement has in Thomas, certainly does do justice to the original gist of it, if it is properly understood, as it will be by anyone who seriously puts following Jesus to practice in their life, as by practicing A Course in Miracles. It is not the ego personality in us that can be "saved" or "enlightened," accepting the atonement means the realization that there is no ego, that it has no reality, that the "tiny, mad, idea" never happened. Likewise this awakening in us, means an awakening to spirit, and can not be recognized by that which is associated with our provenance in the world of time and space, which is the substitute reality of the ego from which we awaken in the process of accepting the atonement for ourselves.

The next Logion which Davies covers here and is also in the Pursah version of the Gospel of Thomas, is Logion 45, which is paralleled in Mark 7:21-23. This point is a parallel to the idea Jesus gave to Helen Schucman: "What you do with a desert is you leave." (as quoted in Ken Wapnick's biography of her Absence from Felicity, p.236). In the Pursah version this Logion is reduced to its absolute bare essence, making the point again in a different way that the dead nature of the ego cannot bring forth the truth, that love cannot come from fear, etc. The way this is elaborated in the Markan passage does not compromise the original intent, namely that the truth comes from within, and is content, not dependent on form. However, we do note that the emphasis is shifted to some of the lines which Pursah leaves off, indicating that in her view these were later accretions, and not part of the original saying.

Next Davies relates Mk 9:35, 10:31, and 10:43-44 to Logion 4b (i.e. the second clause). Clearly here the Markan version editorializes and gives a concrete meaning to the original statement which it did not necessarily have, by adding the consideration of serving others. This then evolves into some of the moral principles of Christianity, but has little to do with the original intent of the saying.

Next comes Mk 11:15-19, which parallels Logion 64b, which is however omitted entirely by Pursah. Mk 11:22-23 parallel Logion 48, and provide only a slight embellishment - Thomas speaks only of "moving" the mountain, but the Markan passage speaks of "throwing yourself into the sea," which does not seem to corrupt the meaning.

Mk 12:13-17 parallels Logion 100, here the Markan version is no more than a graphical embellishment, and a dramatization, without necessarily altering the original meaning.

This brings my commentaries on these marvellous articles from Stevan Davies to an end, and on the whole one can see how the synoptic version is an evident elaboration of the sayings version, and in some cases clearly shifts the meaning in a particular direction. Considering the process in light of Pursah's edits, sheds a different light on it from time to time.

Stevan Davies on Thomas Sayings in Mark Part II, Unit 3

2009-05-11T16:12:00.000-04:00

The following passage which is covered in the second article on the use of Thomas in Mark by Stevan Davies, consists of a passage, Mark 4:1-34, which is almost entirely built from Thomas Logia. First, here is the Markan material (NIV):

Mark 4

The Parable of the Sower

¹Again Jesus began to teach by the lake. The crowd that gathered around him was so large that he got into a boat and sat in it out on the lake, while all the people were along the shore at the water's edge. ²He taught them many things by parables, and in his teaching said: ³"Listen! A farmer went out to sow his seed. ⁴As he was scattering the seed, some fell along the path, and the birds came and ate it up. ⁵Some fell on rocky places, where it did not have much soil. It sprang up quickly, because the soil was shallow. ⁶But when the sun came up, the plants were scorched, and they withered because they had no root. ⁷Other seed fell among thorns, which grew up and choked the plants, so that they did not bear grain. ⁸Still other seed fell on good soil. It came up, grew and produced a crop, multiplying thirty, sixty, or even a hundred times." ⁹Then Jesus said, "He who has ears to hear, let him hear."
¹⁰When he was alone, the Twelve and the others around him asked him about the parables. ¹¹He told them, "The secret of the kingdom of God has been given to you. But to those on the outside everything is said in parables ¹²so that,
   " 'they may be ever seeing but never perceiving,
      and ever hearing but never understanding;
   otherwise they might turn and be forgiven!'^[a]"
¹³Then Jesus said to them, "Don't you understand this parable? How then will you understand any parable? ¹⁴The farmer sows the word. ¹⁵Some people are like seed along the path, where the word is sown. As soon as they hear it, Satan comes and takes away the word that was sown in them. ¹⁶Others, like seed sown on rocky places, hear the word and at once receive it with joy. ¹⁷But since they have no root, they last only a short time. When trouble or persecution comes because of the word, they quickly fall away. ¹⁸Still others, like seed sown among thorns, hear the word; ¹⁹but the worries of this life, the deceitfulness of wealth and the desires for other things come in and choke the word, making it unfruitful. ²⁰Others, like seed sown on good soil, hear the word, accept it, and produce a crop—thirty, sixty or even a hundred times what was sown."

A Lamp on a Stand

²¹He said to them, "Do you bring in a lamp to put it under a bowl or a bed? Instead, don't you put it on its stand? ²²For whatever is hidden is meant to be disclosed, and whatever is concealed is meant to be brought out into the open. ²³If anyone has ears to hear, let him hear." ²⁴"Consider carefully what you hear," he continued. "With the measure you use, it will be measured to you—and even more. ²⁵Whoever has will be given more; whoever does not have, even what he has will be taken from him."

The Parable of the Growing Seed

²⁶He also said, "This is what the kingdom of God is like. A man scatters seed on the ground. ²⁷Night and day, whether he sleeps or gets up, the seed sprouts and grows, though he does not know how. ²⁸All by itself the soil produces grain—first the stalk, then the head, then the full kernel in the head. ²⁹As soon as the grain is ripe, he puts the sickle to it, because the harvest has come."

The Parable of the Mustard Seed

³⁰Again he said, "What shall we say the kingdom of God is like, or what parable shall we use to describe it? ³¹It is like a mustard seed, which is the smallest seed you plant in the ground. ³²Yet when planted, it grows and becomes the largest of all garden plants, with such big branches that the birds of the air can perch in its shade." ³³With many similar parables Jesus spoke the word to them, as much as they could understand. ³⁴He did not say anything to them without using a parable. But when he was alone with his own disciples, he explained everything.

The majority of this material seems to be straight from the Thomas Gospel, with the exception of lines 3-8, 14-20, and 33-34, which Davies thinks were an addition by Mark. We are thus left with the following quotes from Thomas in Mark:

Mk 4:3-8 cf. Logion 9, in Mk 4:5-6 this is extended somewhat, in the typical explanatory interpolations which we've seen elsewhere, but not so as to change the meaning dramatically.
Variations of the ears to hear theme are in Logia 8, 21, 24, 63, (65), 96. They occur here in 4:9, and 4:23, and Davies treats them as a "traditional admonition," and there is no evident way that their meaning is construed much differently from the original, although in Christianity statements like this get terribly abused later, since they become the fuel for proselytizing first, and religious wars later, when it gets more strident. There the normal mechanism of projection is hard at work, and people don't use the statements in the introspective way which is still the dominant mode of the Thomas text, but it is turned against others, in a proselytizing and judgmental way. (Note: Pursah's version skips Logion 65)
Mark 4:10-13 is related to Thomas Logion 62, and the Markan construction per se does not necessitate the later Christian misuse of the passage, which increasingly becomes fodder for the obfuscation of religion, covering up all seemingly unexplainable issues as "mysteries of the faith," as opposed to Jesus' original intention of communicating in a way that could only be validated by experience, which is really the essence of the meaning of mysterion also in the Greek mystery religions, which were essentially directed to experience of the mystery, in the full awareness that words alone were not enough. In Christian parlance the mysteries of the faith are glib constructs to explain away that which seems at odds with accepted perceptions, they are a way for theology to gloss over the seemingly unlikelier aspects of the faith, exactly because it confines itself to mental constructs, and avoids the experiential aspect which is so decisively important.
Davies also notes that Mark labels many of the materials he borrows from Thomas Logia as "parables," which connects exactly to the observation above, namely that parables point with words to the experience of something that will reveal itself to us only if we do follow Jesus in fact, and will forever remain a closed book, if we confine ourselves to talking about doing it, as most religion does.
Next interestingly in 4:21 is a parallel to Logion 33, which Pursah rejects for her version, and which material evidently occurs in the sources in several variations. In Christianity this type of a saying proved conducive to fueling the fires of proselytizing.
Then comes Mk 4:22, an apparent adaptation from Logion 5, and the latter part of 6 (which Pursah disallows). There is nothing here that denotes a pronounce shift in interpretation.
Mk. 4:25/Logion 41 have nothing particular to offer they are nearly identical. I can't vouch for how this has been interpreted...
Mk. 4:26-29 Would correspond to Logion 21, which Pursah rejects. It is also a quotation from Joel 3:13 as Davies points out, and so it may be one thing that was put in Jesus' mouth for an editorial purpose.
Mk. 4:30-32 parallels Logion 20 closely. Most meanings are obvious by association. One meaning that was probably not intended was the collection of vast real estate holdings.

While in some points we saw here a shift of meaning towards what we might regard as a more Christian mold, none of it was as dramatic perhaps as some of the examples I covered earlier, related to the first Davies article, where there was so much editorial around the sayings that it clearly shifted their meaning in a specific direction. In general it is simply interesting to see how bits and pieces from other traditions are woven into a somewhat coherent narrative by Mark. This stuff just makes a living tradition like this come to life, if you contemplate it a bit.

Whatever became of Thomas?

2009-05-07T16:09:00.000-04:00

Here is a video from Gary Renard's Happy Dream Cruise...

Enjoy. Gary at one point was talking about making a movie as a counter point to Mel Gibson's S&M drama about Jesus, to show what a wonderful sense of humor Jesus had. It hasn't happened yet, but here at least you get the tone of the Cruise we just did.

Stevan Davies on Thomas Sayings in Mark, Part II, Unit 2

2009-05-03T16:06:00.000-04:00

Stevan Davies' 2nd article on the transition from Thomas to Mark focuses on the section Mark 3:20-35, and in it he sees Logia 35, 44, and common themes with 61, 64, and 99, and then some usage that is present in 57, 76, 96. 97, 98, 113.

To make it easy, I'm quoting the Markan passage here from the NIV:

Mark 3:20-35 (New International Version)

Jesus and Beelzebub

²⁰Then Jesus entered a house, and again a crowd gathered, so that he and his disciples were not even able to eat. ²¹When his family heard about this, they went to take charge of him, for they said, "He is out of his mind."

²²And the teachers of the law who came down from Jerusalem said, "He is possessed by Beelzebub^[a]! By the prince of demons he is driving out demons."

²³So Jesus called them and spoke to them in parables: "How can Satan drive out Satan? ²⁴If a kingdom is divided against itself, that kingdom cannot stand. ²⁵If a house is divided against itself, that house cannot stand. ²⁶And if Satan opposes himself and is divided, he cannot stand; his end has come. ²⁷In fact, no one can enter a strong man's house and carry off his possessions unless he first ties up the strong man. Then he can rob his house. ²⁸I tell you the truth, all the sins and blasphemies of men will be forgiven them. ²⁹But whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit will never be forgiven; he is guilty of an eternal sin."
³⁰He said this because they were saying, "He has an evil spirit."

Jesus' Mother and Brothers

³¹Then Jesus' mother and brothers arrived. Standing outside, they sent someone in to call him. ³²A crowd was sitting around him, and they told him, "Your mother and brothers are outside looking for you." ³³"Who are my mother and my brothers?" he asked.
³⁴Then he looked at those seated in a circle around him and said, "Here are my mother and my brothers! ³⁵Whoever does God's will is my brother and sister and mother."

Funnily enough I remember one thing about this passage in relation to Christianity, or particularly Roman Catholicism. My ex-wife got upset with me one day when I made reference to Jesus's siblings, convinced that I was making it up. I showed her this passage and other similar passages. Later we found out that someone wrote a whole book about facts from the Bible that were generally suppressed in Catholic teachings. All of which was possible of course particularly pre Vatican II, because studying the Bible generally was not "done" in that environment. A lot has changed since then, and the RC crowd has now joined the Protestants in the search for the "historical" Jesus, which the Protestants originally, in the 19th century conceived as their best defense against the catholics playing footloose and fancy free with the "facts" of the Bible.
Davies traces the opening passages (through 3:26) of the above section to the Q tradition, and sees essentially Thomas quotes after that, starting with 3:27, Logion 35 (skipped in the Pursah version); 3:28-29, Logion 44 (skipped in the Pursah version); 3:31-35, Logion 99 (Present in the Pursah version). In other words, right away we have a strong hint here that some of the sources may be dubious from Pursah's standpoint, as she skips the first quotes on which this is based. We may also notice however that here way of expressing her views on the matter is rather mild, and she never does say that none of the other sayings are even partially authentic, but in essence she's saying there are too many corruptions with them, but these 70/71 in the collection she feels she can vouch for, based on her recollection.
While we once again see how the narrative process is at work using various known elements to weave its story, this passage actually does make sense if you read it the right way. Speaking strictly from the standpoint of a Course student, the Markan passage may make sense on many levels. The first is the accusation of Jesus being possessed by the devil, which if you think about it, really finds its corollary in the notion in the Course that to the ego the guiltless are guilty, although that relates more specifically to the scene in front of Pontius Pilate, but I'll quote it here in full:

Much of the ego's strange behavior is directly attributable to its definition of guilt. To the ego, the guiltless are guilty. Those who do not attack are its "enemies" because, by not valuing its interpretation of salvation, they are in an excellent position to let it go. They have approached the darkest and deepest cornerstone in the ego's foundation, and while the ego can withstand your raising all else to question, it guards this one secret with its life, for its existence depends on keeping this secret. So it is this secret that we must look upon, for the ego cannot protect you against truth, and in its presence the ego is dispelled. (ACIM:T-13.II.4)

The whole point here is that from the Course's point of view Satan or Beelzebub are understandable projections, personifications of the ego thought itself, and it's most basic form of defense IS projection, accusing the other of what it itself does. Thus also the ego IS the house divided against itself, for at the most abstract level it is the thought that the separation of God (splitting off from God, respectively "dividing" itself from God) is possible, which then gives rise to the phenomenon of the split mind, which not only splits itself off from God, but completely identifies itself with the split off part to the point of forgetting its immortal self as the Son of God completely, except for the quiet presence of the Holy Spirit, which is always still present in part of our mind, regardless of how much we try to repress and ignore it. And of course the ego's house will not stand, for the ego thought and all that it makes up subsequently by definition live on borrowed time, they are not the creations of love of our eternal, immortal Self, they are the substitute relaties which are manifested, projected from the split mind, and nothing is permanent about them.
We should not have to wonder why Pursah would have rejected Logia 35 and 44 from her collection, as 35 is murky to say the least, and 44 is the diametrical opposite of what Jesus taught, and so certainly does not make any sense being in the collection. This is one of the hallmarks of Christianity, that it did incorporate a lot of corruptions, because it is completely reflective of the taught system of the wrong mind, and so it continues the mistakes of the Old Testament tradition, in which God is alternately loving and hateful. Jesus on the other hand represents oneness, and a thoughtsystem that is entirely consistent, because it reflects nothing else but oneness.
The final statement, reflecting Logion 99, makes complete sense, and acts here as the punch line. In Course terms, what Jesus is advocating here is the point that special relationships are of the ego, be they family/heredity, or any other, and that the Holy Relationship as the Course calls it is the way in which we are joined with our brothers, and the only way in which we can join with our brothers is in the mind, and never with the body. And of course, where two or three are together in my name, there I am in their midst (again: in the mind), or as the Course puts it:

You who are now the bringer of salvation have the function of bringing light to darkness. The darkness in you has been brought to light. Carry it back to darkness, from the holy instant to which you brought it. We are made whole in our desire to make whole. Let not time worry you, for all the fear that you and your brother experience is really past. Time has been readjusted to help us do, together, what your separate pasts would hinder. You have gone past fear, for no two minds can join in the desire for love without love's joining them. (ACIM:T-18.III.7)