A New Exploration of the Manual for Teachers

This coming Wednesday, October 14th we will start a new cycle in my ACIM workshop at the NY theosophical society, studying the Manual for Teachers.

Starting on this one more time, brings up memories of my first experiences with the Course, and the enormous resistance against it, particularly for the tremendous sense of responsibility it seemed to saddle me with.

• What do you mean I made up the world?
• What do you mean Jesus and I are the same?
• What do you mean I did this to myself?
• What do you mean I'm a teacher of God, I don't want to?

I actually was sitting in a workshop in Roscoe with Ken Wapnick, when it finally began to dawn on me that Jesus does mean it very literally that the only difference between him and me (the reader) is in time. That he can help us because he went ahead, but there is nothing he could do that we can't. And I surely thought that I knew better already, after all I was not a Christian, but studying Jesus in his own right as best I could all my life, etc. I thought I knew, but clearly I did not hear.

It is fundamental to the Course to understand that the only hope is to know that the only thing that can be changed is my decision to identify with the ego, and the only way it can be changed is by letting the Holy Spirit in by stopping to choose the ego, and asking for help, which must come from outside the insane ego system. And this is where the Course can help. It is crucial to know that this is the only way we can be helped, to help ourselves to quit helping ourselves and asking for help instead.

And then in turn by doing it ourselves, and practicing the Course's principles in the daily classrooms of your life, you finally realize that it is really true that the only way to teach the Course is by learning it ourselves, certainly not by teaching any classes. The practice of learning it's curriculum is the only means we have to help our brothers on the way home. And so it is not a burdensome responsibility with which it wants to saddle us, but rather it is the only way of meaningful communication, which places us back into the stream of life.




Copyright, © 2009 Rogier F. van Vlissingen. All rights reserved.