Advaita Vedanta On My Mind

Somehow the first teachings I explored outside of the Christian mystical tradition I was brought up with, were Lao Tzu and the Tao Teh King, and the teachings of Sri Ramakrishna as well as Sri Ramana Maharshi. In the context of the sort of theosophical atmosphere of my upbringing, these were perhaps obvious connections, and now after studying ACIM for almost 25 years, it seems even more obvious to me now how it all fits together.

Recently, I became aware of Ken Bok's visit with Mooji, in the context of "Il congreso del perdon," in Madrid, Spain in 2012, which apparently included both Advaita teachers (mainly Mooji) and some ACIM teachers, mainly spanish. Ken interviewed Mooji, and one of the interesting features was certainly to notice how the very idiosyncratic idiom of both traditions can get in the way, if you don't watch out.

Evidently ACIM and Advaita would agree on such ideas as: only truth is true, and everything else is false. In many ways Advaita and the Course come very close, and there would be no fundamental disagreement, but there is a vast difference in form that may not be easy to bridge for some. Being fully conversant with the terminology of both is not a trivial task. The Course says "God is, and then we cease to speak..." (ACIM:W-169.5:4) Only the absolute is, all else is but appearance, maya, illusion. Again, Advaita would have no problem with that statement.

Besides the differences in terminology, and in process, it seems to me that at the abstract level of the teaching, there is only one specific issue that really separates the two, and that is the answer to the question which the Course would humorously refer to as: "How did the impossible happen?" I was reminded of this not too long ago by a former advaita teacher in Holland, Jan van Delden, who more recently got involved with A Course in Miracles, in part because of the way it deals with that particular question, and in part because as a path it gives people a level of handholding that is unprecedented in any other spirituality. Curiously, his own process involved mostly Advaita, but also a strong experience of recognition and guidance from Homer's Odyssey, which is nothing but a parable for the "homeward journey' we all have to make, not just the hero from the Trojan war. It is a symbol of our journey home, just as much as the book of Exodus is in the Old Testament, or in fact the gospel story itself. 

Jan shared with me how towards the end of the life of his advaita teacher, Jan told his teacher how he suspected that the dream that is our life in the world is made up by us, that we are the dreamer of the dream - which is an essential concept of the Course, and the very reason salvation is even possible. Namely, if we had an insipid idea, and we're suffering the consequences, we can also choose to change our mind, and the Course in effect offers us the tools to help us change our mind. The Advaita way of talking about the same thing varies between the Godhead playing a game of hide and seek, "who am I," or variations on that theme. (See a discussion of the major variations here.) As Eliot Deutsch points out in his book Advaita Vedanta: "For Advaita Vedanta, then, the phenomenal world is maya, and it is produced by maya. But it is not on that account merely a figment of one's imagination." (Deutsch, p.31) 

ACIM on the contrary says simply: There is no world, as here:

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-132.6, highlighting added)

In short, in the language of metaphor, God does not even know about the world, he did not create it, because it is not there, just as much as your dreams at night simply disappear when you open your eyes. To ACIM the thought that God created the world is definitely part of the problem set, because it grants the world an objective reality it does not have.

An Advaita site goes sofar as to criticize ACIM over this issue as follows: 

ACIM's theology is also grounded in the idea that people's experience of the world is a cognitive mistake or error. This is very different than the best of Indian Advaita, which teaches this same idea as a preliminary doctrine but ultimately counsels that the world is a dream or illusion emanated by God (Brahman), not by the ego, and that it is an emanation out of pure Divine playfulness or lila (pronounced “leela”) and loving Grace, not a "mistake." 

(http://www.enlightened-spirituality.org/ACIM_critique.html)

It seems to me there is simply a different teaching approach behind both systems, and this is a clear example of why you can't mix and match, for you'll get duck soup.

Just like ACIM says "God is, and then we cease to speak"  so in Advaita, Brahman is "one only without a second," as the Upanishads would have it. But then the differences arise. The Course sees the world as an "attack on God," (ACIM:W-pII.3.2:1), and how it gets there is that the Son, all the while being one with his creator, entertains a "tiny mad idea," the idea of separation, following which he represses the memory of Heaven (called the Holy Spirit in the Course), and fully identifies himself with the separation thought (ego), and to escape the pain in his mind, because he is driven mad by guilt over his attack on God, he then projects a physical world, that is the expression of the separation thought. In short, all the world is, is the expression of a silly little idea we had, and when we stop fighting it, which only makes it real, we can forgive it, and eventually undo our belief in it, as we remember the reality of who we are in truth and it fades away into the "nothingness from which it came." In short, we never ever were separate from God, but we thought we were because we entertained the "tiny mad idea," and took it seriously. So yes, in the Course the world is maya, and sustained only by our belief in it, because its origin lies in the guilt that arises from the thought of a separate identity, the ego thought.

In Advaita, the way that story of the origin is told, it takes on a little more objectivity, as if Brahman, as Ishvara, had the idea of the world, which grants it some objectivity, almost in spite of the fact that anything besides Brahman is treated as illusory, maya. In a way it is as if Isvara is somewhat of a parallel of the creator God, Ialdabaoth in the gnostic tradition, be it that Ishvara is merely another aspect of Brahman. In the way the Course describes it, Ialdabaoth is a projection of the ego, the separation thought, and is the progeny of Sophia in gnostic myth, or, to describe it more psychologically he is the angry God of the Old Testament, who we fear, because we have projected our guilt over the thought of separation onto him. It is this imaginary God we are running from. The real God is not angry about the separation thought, or the world - He does not even know there is a world, or a "you," ALL of that is a figment of your imagination. Ken Wapnick liked to sum this up as: "The world is a maladaptive solution to a non-existent problem." For there never was any separation, it was only a dream, our only job is to have the "little willingness," to doubt the reality of it and then ask the Holy Spirit, and our inner teacher, Jesus to guide us on the journey home. "It is a journey without distance to a goal that has never changed." (ACIM:T-8.VI.9:7)

On the other hand, when I hear Mooji state it as; "You are the supreme and perfect self. Playing a game of how do I find myself," it is clear that to some degree the distinctions between the two at the abstract level are small and subtle. At that level he is addressing our real Self, just as does Jesus in the Course, (or, more precisely the "decision maker" to use Ken Wapnicks, term - the faculty to choose between ego and Holy Spirit. If you would just add that it was a stupid little game, and to hear in your other ear Jesus saying how we can laugh the consequences of that stupid little idea away with him, the two schools of thought are very close indeed. The reality of it is that different forms and different paths are necessary within this world of differences, and to quote something Jesus said to Helen: you should not judge your brother's path, nor should you take it as your own. And to look at the process of learning the Course, one becomes aware more and more that we all learn it by misunderstanding it first, for the resistance is enormous. So we all constantly misinterpret the Course, because our ego is fighting it, and then we get to correct ourselves again, and again and again. Some of us may go off for a while even making a business out of our misinterpretations, which has given rise to a whole "Course in Miracles Industry," as Ken Wapnick used to call it. It does not matter. They are all ways of working with the material, and we will go deeper and deeper as we go along, and at some point we will realize there simply is no going back, the pain of the ego system is simply too great. The fleshpots of Egypt have lost their appeal for good.

On a practical level, the Course is a path that engages with the world, with your dream life and your relationships, by teaching you to not make decisions with your ego, but to learn gradually that it is all thought, and that what matters is to let go of the ego's urge to think that anything at all must be done, and instead every thought needs to be forgiven first, to the point where we are no longer acting from the ego, but purely under the guidance of our inner teacher. The Course does not teach abandoning the world, but engaging with it, just with a different teacher, the Holy Spirit, not the ego:

You who have tried to learn what you do not want should take heart, for although the curriculum you set yourself is depressing indeed, it is merely ridiculous if you look at it. Is it possible that the way to achieve a goal is not to attain it? Resign now as your own teacher. This resignation will not lead to depression. It is merely the result of an honest appraisal of what you have taught yourself, and of the learning outcomes that have resulted. Under the proper learning conditions, which you can neither provide nor understand, you will become an excellent learner and an excellent teacher. But it is not so yet, and will not be so until the whole learning situation as you have set it up is reversed. (ACIM:T-12.V.8, highlighting added)

I discovered Mooji through my friend Ken Bok just now, and I've been listening to some of his YouTube videos intently. It has mobilized my profound interest in Advaita Vedanta all over again, although I was already on that track because of my communication with Jan van Deelden. I find it most helpful to listen and read the Advaita material with the full appreciation that they are different systems, so much so that it can actually be helpful to notice how the same things are approached in different ways. I feel very much at home in the Advaita material, and I'm enjoying re-reading stuff I had rarely looked at for forty years, but the Course is definitely my path, for it helped me with some critical things that no other discipline has ever given me. Which means nothing special, except that it is clearly my path.

To outsiders looking at the Course, the difficulty is equally great. The idiosyncrasies of the Course and its very specific idiom are such that it is easy to misread it. The fact that it is written on such a high level, makes it hard, but also, to the casual reader it is very easy to overlook the levels within the Course. Level one, which is "God is," "Truth is true," "Heaven," "God," "Oneness," "Spirit," and Level two, the level of the world we experience, which is a dream, and all duality is metaphorical, but what we learn with the Course is that, by asking our inner teacher for guidance, we can learn to reinterpret the metaphor, and it can become our classroom, and the vehicle for our journey home. 

I am going to enjoy my re-discovery of the world of Advaita for a while... Thinking back to my first acquaintance with Advaita Vedanta teachers, I remember that it was a conscious decision on my part that I somehow sensed the solution was not to go and meditate in a cave in the Himalayas, but I wanted to be in the world. That was a very deliberate choice, and so it could be no surprise that I ended up finding A Course in Miracles later in life, a path that very much teaches that the journey is right where you are, and that inner change is the only thing that makes a difference:

Projection makes perception. The world you see is what you gave it, nothing more than that. But though it is no more than that, it is not less. Therefore, to you it is important. It is the witness to your state of mind, the outside picture of an inward condition. As a man thinketh, so does he perceive. Therefore, seek not to change the world, but choose to change your mind about the world. Perception is a result and not a cause. And that is why order of difficulty in miracles is meaningless. Everything looked upon with vision is healed and holy. Nothing perceived without it means anything. And where there is no meaning, there is chaos. (ACIM:T-21.in.1, highlighting added)

In Memoriam D. N.

It is a delight to see the work of Margot Krikhaar spreading slowly, ever since the book Awakening in Love,  was published in the summer of last year. With little publicity, excepting some events in a small circle, clearly, the word is getting out.

For me personally, I have been delighted with the feedback ever since we had a small gathering at the place where I give my Manhattan workshops on the Course, in September of 2012, and I have gradually begun to get feedback from all the participants in that event. Some time in January of 2013 my friend D. N. reported to me that he was rereading the book, and he was deeply, deeply moved by it. I knew him as a man of few words, but certainly as one person who was never at a loss for words, and his mastery of the English language stood him in good stead in his profession as a lawyer. But that time he choked up and he was simply at a loss for words, and I knew something profound was going on with him.

D. had known of A Course in Miracles since it first appeared, and in fact his wife told me at one point that she got their first copy from Judy Skutch in Washington when it just appeared. D. was one of the many people who found it hard to get "into" the Course, although it evidently attracted him. He was one of many people for whom the reading of Gary Renard's The Disappearance of the Universe, was the breakthrough he had needed, which opened up the Course to him. Since then he had studied Gary's work intensely, and subsequently became a student of the work of Ken Wapnick, and now he started reading Margot Krikhaar's book.

When he told me about his experience of re-reading the book, he was just about to take off on vacation to Hawaii, that Island state where Gary Renard hoped to live one day, only to see his ex-wife Karen beat him to it. As it was, D. left for Hawaii with his family, and they were going to attend a dream workshop while there, but obviously they were also there to enjoy nature. One day, D. had a beautiful dream, in which he found himself in a large hall, in something like the Waldorf-Astoria, between two groups of people with different color t-shirts, and: "Then an old man with a long white beard entered, and D. knew he was the Leader of Planetary Consciousness. The people all moved away from him, while D. went towards him. Then he woke, singing The Gambler." As it was, the day that he had this dream, and shared it with his family at breakfast, was to be his last day in this sublunar world. Later in the day, he went swimming and was gripped by a riptide, and did not make it.

I was told of this dream later by his now widow, and for me it chimed in powerfully with the emotion I had seen and heard in him about Margot's book, and it would appear to symbolize a decision in the mind of leaving the dead to bury the dead, of leaving duality what it is, and choosing oneness instead. Naturally, that does not necessarily have to coincide with leaving the body and making your transition, but it certainly suggests a deep level of peace of mind at the moment that he did, which evidently is the objective of ACIM. Margot's book is a powerful testimony in its own right, and clearly my friend welcomed the reinforcement of the relationship to our inner Teacher which is so evident in the book. Based on his life-long interest in Tibetan Buddhism (an interest I did not know I had in common with him), his last rites were performed by a Buddhist priest on Hawaii, and he was cremated there, and his ashes spread on the ocean.

More recently I attended a memorial service for him, which was truly a celebration of a rich life, and I was delighted to hear that this man, who had been a successful corporate attorney, had expressed that he wanted to be remembered as a spiritual person, more so than as a lawyer. He was a very dear friend to me, who I had met when he hosted a dinner for Gary Renard at one of Gary's New York workshops, where I was the organizer. The moment of him telling me about his second reading of Awakening In Love, will be with me forever.


Copyright, © 2012 Rogier F. van Vlissingen. All rights reserved.

Margot Krikhaar's Awakening in Love Revisited

The first half of this year was for me a time of deep immersion in the translation of Margot Krikhaar's book Awakening in Love, which has now been on the market as an e-book since the fall of 2012 - see www.innerpeacepublications.com and/or visit your favorite e-book site.

Surrounding the book, there seems to be an intensifying conversation for many people about intensifying our work with the Course, and making it more personal. There is no doubt in my mind that the Course is as comprehensive as it is for a reason, but equally the expanding literature around the Course serves a purpose. The standard bearer is of course Ken Wapnick, and the merit of his work is that it explains the Course with the Course, and by seeing every sentence and every paragraph in the context of the overall work, students are prevented from going off-track, which has been the risk of much of the secondary literature.

Gary Renard and some writers who have followed in his wake (Mike Lemieux comes to mind) has the role of popularizer--something everybody thought could never be done--by putting the Course teachings in the vernacular and also by offering the view "in the kitchen" of his own life, of learning by doing, and of forgetting to forgive, and starting over on a constant basis. Next to Gary's growing body of work, Mike Lemieux's Dude, Where's My Jesus Fish provides almost the Cliff notes to DU and YIR, and a lot of humor besides. Laughter is definitely a healing power!

Margot Krikhaar's book is in a category all its own, and she also sticks to the message of the Course. What makes it unique and interesting is that she did it in another language (Dutch), and she only got her start with the Course when it appeared in a Dutch translation, which was not till 1999. However, she must have been really ready. Like many of us, she had explored a lot of things along the way to her encounter with the Course, but when she found it, it was love at first sight. She had had some cursory exposure to it, but it clicked once she had the book in her hands in Dutch. She started from a Catholic upbringing, which is not something I personally identify with, but other than that almost all of her experiences, which she shares with her reader in this book, were very evocative in triggering memories of what I might have been doing at similar stages of life. The book covers Margot's life up to the point of discovering the Course, and what happened afterward through to her experience of awakening. After the current book appeared, Margot quickly emerged as one of the leading Course teachers in Holland, though more recently she has had to give that up for health reasons.

On September 12th, 2012 we had a special evening of my regular NY Course workshop at the New York Theosophical Society on East 53rd Street in Manhattan. That was more or less the starting signal for sales of the e-book. For now the book will ONLY be available as an e-book until volumes justify doing a print edition. The session brought together nearly all of the people who had been directly involved in the production of the translation, starting with the publisher, Annelies Ekeler, and the woman who financed the translation, as well as myself and two proofreaders who had worked on it with me. As I've shared elsewhere on this blog, for myself the project had been a big forgiveness lesson, and I'm sure the same goes for many of the other participants. That's only natural, and the payoff came in new inspiration and an expansion of learning.

Annelies Ekeler, is the dream publisher for this type of material, and IPP is becoming an interesting feature in the Course process in Holland, with both two titles by Margot, and a title from Ken Wapnick, and more on the way. Starting with this book, now also with the reverse, bringing Dutch books to the international market.
Besides being the inspired conductor of the little orchestra of this publishing house, she also is an active teacher herself, and a blogger on the Course, in her native Dutch. I want to share a piece she wrote recently, which I'm translating hereby:

It is not how 'heavy' your life is or the amount of suffering which determines when the mind awakens within itself, it is the mind which determines when the projection of sin, guilt and fear stops. Awakening is not a reward for suffering, or the cleaning up of your karma, nor a reward for many lives of suffering, or a reward for sacrifice, awakening is not the result of giving and taking. Awakening is also not the result of doing your best, working hard, and it also is not a reward from a God who feels especially benevolent towards you. Awakening is also not a special reward for a chosen one, nor is it a reward for daily prayer, contemplation or meditation.

The above catalog of everything awakening is not, can however be useful as forgiveness material, by taking back all of these ego-thoughts in the mind, where they can dissolve into the Oneness of Spirit through forgiveness.

Awakening is the decision of the mind to no longer believe in, or choose for, sin, guilt, and fear, but to forgive these, so that the mind awakens to itself, where it has never left.

I was very happy when Annelies sent me this concise summation as a reminder, and I am happy to share it here at the outset of a year in which we want to study Margot's material in my weekly workshops at the Theosophical Society. These words are a very powerful reminder of the basic nature of the forgiveness process:

1. The problem is not out there, but in here
2. In here I can look at it and decide that it's no longer what I want
3. Now I can ask Jesus or the Holy Spirit for their vision of the situation, and let it go into their hands.

It is never about anything else but practicing how to give up my interpretation of the events, and trust in the better guidance from the Holy Spirit instead. It is simple, but not always easy, or the Course would not need 1,300 pages, nor would we need all the other literature. As it is, I'm thankful for the Course, and the many good books we now have to help us truly practice what the Course says, and Margot's book is high on my list.

Copyright, © 2012 Rogier F. van Vlissingen. All rights reserved.

Exodus Revisited

A Course in Miracles firmly stands in the context of the Abrahamic religious tradition, and it is for that reason that I named this blog as I did. I also realized that life had prepared me for appreciating that context to a great degree because I had intensely studied the scriptures earlier in my adventures of searching for God. I had learned Hebrew to read the Old Testament as it should be read, I had read my New Testament in Greek ever since my early teenage years, all as a way of getting closer to the text. I periodically studied the  Quran, though I never got into Arabic. More often I dabbled in Sufi traditions, where I was often deeply touched by the intense spirituality of such masters as Al Hallaj, who taught me the depth of the word Islam, surrender, and Tierno Bokar, who teaches so clearly that jihad is simply the inner struggle of dealing with the temptations of the ego. As the Course would have it, those always boil down to attempts to convince the son of God he is a body.

Temptation has one lesson it would teach, in all its forms, wherever it occurs. It would persuade the holy Son of God he is a body, born in what must die, unable to escape its frailty, and bound by what it orders him to feel. It sets the limits on what he can do; its power is the only strength he has; his grasp cannot exceed its tiny reach. Would you be this, if Christ appeared to you in all His glory, asking you but this: 

Choose once again if you would take your place among the saviors of the world, or would remain in hell, and hold your brothers there. 

(ACIM: T-31.VIII.1) 

At a sufficiently high level of abstracation, one can appreciate the connections of the Course teachings to the Bhagavadgita, to Advaita Vedanta, and Buddhism, and there are plenty of connections worth exploring for those who are familiar with those traditions, but very clearly, first and foremost, the Course is pitched at those who stand in the Abrahamic traditions, and primarily the Judeo-Christian one, which has so much permeated Western culture.

All of the great religions have their so-called esoteric, or mystical traditions, which for the most part are but the lay rendering of spiritual growth discussed in terms of their specific traditions, and which rest on some level of appreciation of the symbolic nature of those traditions, viewing them as parables of an inner process, which is the journey to spiritual awakening. Fundamentally the whole notion of "esoteric" arises only from looking at spiritual traditions without understanding, from an ego frame of reference and at times it then deteriorates into ritualistic meta interpretation of the parables of tradition, of which the Jewish Kabbalah is one of the extreme forms.

In the book of Mark, Jesus speaks of the opening of the understanding, which he performs on the apostles. In A Course in Miracles, there is mention of the fact that: "And it is recognized, that all things must be first forgiven and then understood" (ACIM:T-30.V.1:6). This is tantamount to the same teaching, since forgiveness means joining with Jesus, and choosing his judgment in lieu of the ego's judgment. The path of forgiveness means practicing discipleship of Jesus, and following his teaching. Even if we may fall down many times, we can get up again, and keep on working on it. It is the path of practice and it is the inner journey, the journey from the head to the heart, or as the Course would have it "a journey without distance to a goal that has never changed" (ACIM:T-8.VI.9:7). In terms of the teachings, their meaning is revealed to us from experience, and in the process the symbolism of much of our tradition begins to speak to us on a whole new level, exactly because we start to appreciate the symbolism of our own life, for when we forgive, and join with Jesus in the process, we start to see past the form to the content.

Along these lines a fascinating new book appeared recently by Robert Rosenthal, titled From Plagues to Miracles, and in it the author looks at the book of Exodus, and the account of the journey towards salvation Old Testament style, which of course is just another form of the inner journey which A Course in Miracles is all about. The book is clearly based on an integration of both the author's own inner journey, including his familiarity with A Course in Miracles, and his experience as a psychiatrist and psychotherapist, so that both his own experiences and patient experiences feed into helping us see through the symbolism, and open up a deeper understanding of the nature of the journey for ourselves. At this point we transcend the form of the manifest story, and we get in touch with the content, the inner story, again with our own inner experience as the central teaching/learning opportunity.

This book is a gem, and I shall write about it more in depth in due course. It is firmly rooted in the tradition of A Course in Miracles, without making familiarity with it an issue, so the reader can appreciate it with any background. It is also the story of the author's own discovery of the significance of Passover, as a universal symbol, completely from the awareness, as the traditional etymology of the word Israel (Ish-Ra-El, the man who sees God) would suggest, that it is an expression of mankind (the sonship) in exile, in the diaspora, and in the Egyptian exile in particular. As such it is the precursor to the story of the prodigal son in the New Testament, and its relevance never diminishes, as our growing inner experience lets us relate to it more and more deeply.

Copyright, © 2012 Rogier F. van Vlissingen. All rights reserved.

The Course in the Low Lands by the Sea

For some time now, I have off and on been pretty intensely involved in Course-related matters in Holland, my native country, not in any very overt way, but because of on-going dialog with some Course students, and an active collaboration with Annelies Ekeler in doing translation work for some Course-related writings, like Gary Renard's books, as well as a book by Nouk Sanchez and Tomas Vieira. A year or two ago, I proofread the manuscript for a new book, that has just now come to market in Holland, with a new publishing company called Inner Peace Publications, (notice that on its web page the mission statement is present both in Dutch and in English), founded by Annelies Ekeler, its the publisher, and chief cook and bottle washer. More than anything else, it is with this book, that I feel the Course truly has "landed" in Holland.

The book, which is excellent, was first turned down by essentially every publisher who covers the topic of spirituality. But evidently with good will and devotion from a lot of people, its publication was eventually realized with the launching of this new publishing venture. These kinds of developments are more or less par for the course in publishing in general, but more particularly with the Course, because subject-matter expertise is not a good predictor of success as a publisher, while on the other hand its absence makes for plenty of dubious decisions. The only alternative in worldly terms seems to be some variety of risk-management techniques, the equivalent of "throwing enough mud against the wall to see what sticks." The craftsman-like publishing of old has died, and its modern corporate equivalent is a dispirited reenactment that seems barely or rarely functional.

The Course itself could never have been published commercially when it was first released in the United States, but it eventually became a best-seller of sorts, when a million copies were sold during its first ten years in print, without any advertising. Likewise, Gary Renard's The Disappearance of the Universe could never have been published commercially when it first came out, but by the time it was selling 100,000 copies a year publishers came running.

Meanwhile, in Holland, Nicole de Haas, who at the time was the publisher at Ankh-Hermes, the country's largest publishing company of literary works in the category of spirituality, made the decision to publish the Dutch translation of the Course in 1998 and thereby became the original publisher of the Course in Dutch. That decision, although an insightful act of faith, at the time had every appearance of one of those 'bet the farm' type of decisions in the eyes of the bean counters until it was vindicated only by sales in excess of a million Dutch guilders within just weeks of the book's release. Presently, eight editions later, more than 45,000 copies of it have been sold in Holland, which is a huge number for such a small country. However, Ankh-Hermes subsequently were not so lucky in picking Course-related books for publication. The best example of that probably lies in the fact that the company chose not to publish Gary Renard's book when they had the chance, and another publisher picked it up instead, to its good fortune.

Nicole de Haas passed away this year, the same year when IPP, which is solely dedicated to Course-related books, was born in Holland, at a time when commercial publishers rightly or wrongly believe the Course is too much of a niche market, and simply too small to justify the risk. One way or another, now there is a new publisher devoted to the Course, and its first book was released at the end of June.

The book is Awakening in Love (not available in English at this writing; in Dutch: Ontwaken in Liefde),  and its author is Margot Krikhaar. As mentioned above, I read the book two years ago in manuscript form and its importance was immediately clear to me. I wrote a letter recommending it to various Dutch publishers, and, lo and behold, nobody thought it was commercially a feasible project, so it lingered until a few people got together and formed IPP for the express purpose of publishing Course-related literature in Dutch and eventually possibly other languages as well. Time will tell.

Meanwhile, the book is out, and I think it signifies an important milestone in the further adventures of the Course in the Dutch language. Simply put, this book tells the story from the inside, that is from Margot's personal experience - Margot's experience of actually working with the Course and her subsequent attainment of the real world, aka "enlightenment," or "awakening." Hence the title - Awakening to Love, which, in the words of the Course, is "our natural inheritance," not as any kind of a feat or achievement, but as simple fact, because it is the goal of the Course and it is the inevitable outcome. Only the time it takes can be hastened if we stay faithful to the process of forgiveness, which is the method or path the Course offers us.

There are many things I could say about this book, starting with the fact that I enjoyed every page of it. More to the point, I saw myself in much of what she shares about her personal experiences which she tells, as well as her business experiences, seen from the perspective of the Course. Taken as a whole the book immediately stands out as being the first original Dutch book about the Course that is entirely devoted to the content (its practice and experience in daily life) and not the form (theory) of the Course's process. Not for nothing does the Course say "do not let theology delay you," to address exactly this difference between experience and theory, as in the following section:

The ego will demand many answers that this course does not give. It does not recognize as questions the mere form of a question to which an answer is impossible. The ego may ask, "How did the impossible occur?", "To what did the impossible happen?", and may ask this in many forms. Yet there is no answer; only an experience. Seek only this, and do not let theology delay you. [italics mine] (ACIM:C-in.4) 

Margot freely shares her process with us in the book and focuses our attention therefore on the experiential rather than the theory side of the Course. And thus this book, born from the experience of living the Course - that is, actually learning to live by the guidance of Jesus and the Holy Spirit, instead of in slavery to the ego - signifies in a lot of ways what I mentioned earlier: the Course has truly arrived in Holland. It is an entirely authentic Dutch experience of the process of the Course, and thereby simply transcends all the noise issues that inevitably surround the Course particularly in a translated form. No translation is ever perfect, but if it is true that translation requires understanding (in the sense of experiential knowing), then this book is the best translation of the Course I know of in Dutch, for it is written from that kind of understanding, and expressed in everyday Dutch colloquialism, which will help people to overcome, in rapid tempo, the occasional difficulties with the text of the Course itself, especially in translation. As such it will no doubt do wonders for those Dutch Course students who decide to pick it up.

Among the many things I could share about the stories of Margot's own life experience in the transition from ego-bound decision-making to living with the guidance of the Holy Spirit, I'll take just one that seems relevant here, - particularly in the context of what I referred to above about the difficulty of making business decisions (any decisions really). She discusses a period of her life when she was on public assistance, and, at the same time organizing her own counseling practice, where she needed to function within a framework of numerous requirements, including various business-training courses, demanded of her by both welfare agencies and professional organizations. She describes very vividly how dispiriting such frameworks were, for as the very nature of the ego suggests, this is all reasoned from need, and has nothing whatsoever to do with inner purpose.

No wonder economics is called the dismal science! After all, the ego's scarcity principle, described in the Course, is the very foundation of the concept of value in the world. Therefore, it follows that the entire business framework, about which we learn in school, suffers from the same issues, as it is based on a valuation and organization method which of course takes its foundation in the notion of separation and need for survival, and thus cannot do anything else but be oriented to models of our individual (separate) "reality" such as Maslow's hierarchy of needs, in which spirituality is a luxury we acquire - where no one knows - after all other needs of existence are satisfied. Thus the assumption of the model is that "I" the sole proprietor, or practitioner, or "we"  the corporation, have certain needs that must be met in order to survive, and that the whole purpose of our business is our survival. After all, otherwise why bother? All of this seems valid and reasonable, and my comments are not meant to invalidate that process. However, as we change our own way of looking at things, the inadequacy of such an approach to living becomes apparent as we are learning to live a life of spirit. The results of making this transition from ego-bound survival to listening to the Holy Spirit, will manifest in myriad specific forms for each of us, but Margot's own process with it, and the very personal and direct way she deals with it in the book are truly an inspiration.

The life of spirit is a life of abundance, though it may not necessarily manifest in form. After all, Jesus' final moments were hardly comfortable in terms of outer circumstances; yet in spite of it, he was at total peace knowing he was not his body. So the Calvinistic confusion of form and content, in which "abundance" is interpreted to mean material and bodily wellbeing in the world of form, needs to be looked at with one's Inner Teacher and sorted out. In learning to live from spirit, it will one way or another become clear to us that the ego-bound methods fall short, and, not only that, are a trap that will bind us to the past and to scarcity by their very nature. For they will create a future like the past, the mechanisms of projection guarantee it. So while Margot did go through the motions with all of this good advice and guidance, in the end her process took her to the position where she gave up the ego's fear-based survival tactics entirely, and in the true spirit of what it means to follow the Internal Teacher whom the Western tradition calls Jesus, she found herself having to "lose" her "life" before picking it up anew and becoming the inspiration which she now is and lives, as her book testifies. Suddenly, she is also experiencing an inflow of serious Course students in her workshops, and I'm sure the book will do well, though none of that is necessary, lest we confuse content and form all over again.

In short, the initial decision to publish the Course in Dutch was, again, clearly an act of faith, which would seem irresponsible to the normal understanding of business planning, because it always judges by the past. Yet, it turned out to be the right decision, and a very sound decision indeed. But the commonly accepted reasoning is always based on deriving content from form. As such, it will always fail, as we have seen in spades with, for example, the recent Wall Street burnout. All the mathematical models work only as long as the world conforms to the model, and the financial industry simply ignores that and considers a crash as an accident or an unpredictable externality, like a natural disaster, when a child could see that it is entirely implicit in the methodology, as we touched on here. Ultimately, it cannot work, for, while the ego thought system is fool-proof, it is, thankfully, not God-proof, as the Course also says, here:

You need not fear the Higher Court will condemn you. It will merely dismiss the case against you. There can be no case against a child of God, and every witness to guilt in God's creations is bearing false witness to God Himself. Appeal everything you believe gladly to God's Own Higher Court, because it speaks for Him and therefore speaks truly. It will dismiss the case against you, however carefully you have built it up. The case may be fool-proof, but it is not God-proof. The Holy Spirit will not hear it, because He can only witness truly. His verdict will always be "thine is the Kingdom," because He was given to you to remind you of what you are. [italics mine] (ACIM:T-5.VI.10)

And so, Margot's story in this book is the story of learning the Course's daily lessons of forgiveness and accepting the atonement for oneself, with all the practicality of daily experience. It is the story of learning to increasingly distrust the counsel of the ego and gradually turning to the Holy Spirit for guidance. Nobody can do those steps for you, for only by living them do they become authentically your own. Yet it helps greatly whenever you encounter someone in person (or in this case through a book) who clearly demonstrates by example what it means to follow Jesus in practice to his Kingdom that is not of this world. It has nothing to do with theological or intellectual comprehension or being impractical, but it does have everything to do with learning to live from the authenticity of Who we really are.



Copyright, © 2010 Rogier F. van Vlissingen. All rights reserved.

Corrupting the Tradition - Insights from Pursah's Thomas Kernel

Evidently, there is a deeper reason why in Chapter 7 of Your Immortal Reality Pursah discusses both the modern day corruptions of the Course and the traditional corruptions of Jesus' sayings in the Thomas Gospel and its evolution in the first four centuries, until it was buried and preserved, only to be rediscovered at Nag Hammadi in 1945.

There are numerous angles of this "meta" message (latent content, versus overt content), to be considered here.

First, by the very fact of the providing the revised messages, (sayings), Pursah makes the point of demonstrating just how the corruptions happened, and for anyone who has had any exposure at all to historical text-critical research, the outcomes make a lot of sense, far beyond what one would ever have a hope of reconstructing via the text critical method, simply because the evidence is always patchy. Traditional historical text-criticism might have a problem accepting Pursah's authority in this context, but if that is not your problem, then Pursah's kernel of Thomas is altogether very plausible, because it eliminates a lot of internal contradictions, and it shows in a lot of ways a very likely path which the corruption of the tradition could have taken.

Some of the corrections Pursah offers are slight, and address shades of meaning, others really highlight major distortions, and provide us insight of how that process of distortion happened. Examples are Logia 6 & 14, which Pursah contracts into a single one, and the minute you read it, it makes a lot of sense, and you end up amazed at the embellishments in the Nag Hammadi version, where the second half of 6 and the
first half of 14 appear to be embellishments from a later date, which create an entirely different sayings, not to mention are a lot less coherent in that later form than in the form Pursah suggests as the original one.

Second, there are any number corrections which reflect minor interpretive embellishments both by adding words and by word choices. These are readily evident by a casual comparison of the Pursah-text to the Nag Hammadi-based translations into English.

Third there is the overall effect of demonstrating how different forces pulled a tradition in different directions, and to anyone who has done some reading about the history of early Christianity -- and I mean the first three centuries before the notion of Christianity proper was even explicitly defined at all -- this makes a lot of sense. Then, by juxtaposing the various recent "controversies" (in whose eyes?) surrounding the Course, this provides yet another level of looking at and understanding the forces that could pull such a tradition one way or another, and we should be most grateful that the Course was available to us in written form, and did not go through a generation of oral tradition before being put into book form. Even so it is amazing how much distortion is possible, given the unlimited amounts of ill will and distortion we all are capable of - if we want to put our belief in it.

Thus we realize that then as now the point simply is to focus either on listening and practicing this path, which will take different forms for all of us, though the content is the same, or somehow to compromise it by maintaining a separatist interpretation of this Course, not to mention separatist versions of the Course itself. The latter is how the ego ensures that it, not Jesus or the Holy Spirit, is in charge of our spiritual path, and we stay safely within the perimeter of the insane asylum of the ego, even if we may wander off to the outer edges of the property. Or to speak with Plato, it is the ego that keeps us locked in the cave, making sure we don't pay attention to the madman, who is telling us of the light outside.



Copyright, © 2007 Rogier F. van Vlissingen. All rights reserved.

Special Relationships - the Ego's Obfuscation of the Holy Relationship

One of the key things to understand, which as always becomes experientially clearer only through working with the Course is that the ego's methodology is very predictable and always the same. It's business is to sell us on duality as a substitute for reality, and does everything in its might to keep our attention fully engaged at that level so as to distract us completely from our reality which is in oneness.

The Course is all about relationships - and that is what is perhaps most unique about the Course that it teaches our relationships are our classrooms to get home - once we invite the Holy Spirit as our teacher. The ego uses relationships to distract us to the maximum extent possible. And preferably dresses it all up in a religious aura, at which point we need to appreciate that the ego's use of religion is as a way to obfuscate and protect from examination the faulty assumptions on which its logic rests. In other words to the ego religion is a defense mechanism, and it uses the cloak of spirituality to prevent exposure of its premises.

The culmination of the ego's relationships is surely marriage, which in the church becomes a sacrament, and is surrounded with appropriate mythology. This is the elevation of special relationships to new would-be spiritual and religious heights, whereby the ego literally dresses itself up for Sunday. And so on a worldly level it is now the relationship between two bodies, a man and a woman which is being declared sacred, and the celebration of specialness is substituted for the meaning of the Holy Relationship, which would have us see our true Self, "the face of Christ" as the Course calls it in all our brothers. Naturally such sacraments and mysteries of the faith are not open to examination, since the ego cannot bear the uncovering of its unfounded assumptions, lest it should go back to "the nothingness from which it came," (ACIM:M-13.1:2) like all other ego thoughts must when they are brought into the light.

In the world all relationships are designed to be special and exclusive, and serve the purpose of clouding over the one betrayal that we make real by virtue of our worship of specialness and separation, which is the ego thought itself , the thought of separation, the thought that the "tiny mad idea" could really be real, just because of our say so. And so we have the notions of faithfulness, adultery, jealousy, loyalty and so on in the world, between separated individuals, and a whole code of presumably virtuous behavior, as well as institutions to make real our faithlessness and sinfulness by the seeming absolution which is solidly founded on "confessing" our sins and making them very real. And so these institutions elevate the ego's forgiveness to destroy to an art form, and are dutifully maintained by us. We have special relationships pertaining to "intimacy" defined in various ways, marriage being only one of them, but we have business loyalties, brand loyalties, and so on, constantly fooling ourselves with the virtues of being loyal to something that isn't worth being loyal to, while denying our loyalty to our true Self in the process. The Course puts it this way:

"
You do not realize how much you have misused your brothers by seeing them as sources of ego support. As a result, they witness to the ego in your perception, and seem to provide reasons for not letting it go. Yet they are far stronger and much more compelling witnesses for the Holy Spirit. And they support His strength. It is, therefore, your choice whether they support the ego or the Holy Spirit in you. And you will recognize which you have chosen by their reactions. A Son of God who has been released through the Holy Spirit in a brother is always recognized. He cannot be denied. If you remain uncertain, it is only because you have not given complete release. And because of this, you have not given a single instant completely to the Holy Spirit. For when you have, you will be sure you have. You will be sure because the witness to Him will speak so clearly of Him that you will hear and understand. You will doubt until you hear one witness whom you have wholly released through the Holy Spirit. And then you will doubt no more.
"(ACIM:T-15.II.4)

The way forward becomes simple and clear the more we take the trouble to actually look honestly with Jesus at all the hidden assumptions which the ego never wants us to questions, just so as to be able to keep up the charade a while longer. And on the way we end up cracking ourselves up when we see the seriousness with which we maintain all of these presumed worldly virtues, once we start getting it that they are in fact nothing but our pledge of allegiance to the ego system, which does not even work, for it may be "foolproof," but it is definitely not "God proof." (ACIM:T-5.VI.10:6) It is upon us to let the light shine in, which begins with questioning the ego. The path to the Holy Relationship begins when in our relationships we learn to be true to our true Self, by following Jesus, instead of our idol worship of specialness at the altar of the ego.

Copyright, © 2007 Rogier F. van Vlissingen. All rights reserved.

Do This in Remebrance of Me.

In T-2.V.17:2 the Course says the following:
My request "Do this in remembrance of me" is the appeal for cooperation of miracle workers.

One might wonder 'this' would refer to. Certainly not the construct which Pauline Christianity makes of it, namely the questionable and somewhat cannibalistic celebration of his body, supposedly to remember that he was once with us, in times when he no longer is, as in after the crucifixion.

Such interpretation is the complete opposite of what Jesus teaches in the Course. And, we might add, as Jesus taught, period - as the careful study of the kernel of Thomas which Pursah handed us in Gary Renard's Your Immortal Reality would reveal.

In other words the interpretation given to these words - leaving aside altogether the Pauline theology of vicarious salvation which is also inextricably woven into the theology of this particular gospel passage, from Lk. 22:19, in the Course's terms is certainly not that we should in the future commemorate the erstwhile presence of Jesus' body with us. The cooperation of miracle workers at any time lies in the ability to join with Jesus whenever needed, because the miracle worker would know that he's always present to us whenever we are ready to question the ego's judgment of situations, and depend on his help rather than our own judgment.

A passage in Chapter 7 makes the whole teaching even clearer:
You cannot forget the Father because I am with you, and I cannot forget Him. 2 To forget me is to forget yourself and Him Who created you. 3 Our brothers are forgetful. 4 That is why they need your remembrance of me and of Him Who created me. 5 Through this remembrance, you can change their minds about themselves, as I can change yours. 6 Your mind is so powerful a light that you can look into theirs and enlighten them, as I can enlighten yours. 7 I do not want to share my body in communion because this is to share nothing. 8 Would I try to share an illusion with the most holy children of a most holy Father? 9 Yet I do want to share my mind with you because we are of one Mind, and that Mind is ours. 10 See only this Mind everywhere, because only this is everywhere and in everything. 11 It is everything because it encompasses all things within itself. 12 Blessed are you who perceive only this, because you perceive only what is true. (ACIM:T-7.V.10:4)

Evidently the punch line is in line 7, where he clarifies that he does not want to share his body with us, but rather he wants to share his mind with us. And moreover he wants us to share his reality with others by choosing to join with him at any time and represent his teaching of love in so doing. So the point of this particular statement is to emphasize the reality of his presence to us, whenever we choose the miracle, as opposed to celebrating the memory of his body as some kind of a magical cure, which of course in the ego's sick imagining obviates the need of choosing the atonement for ourselves, by maintaining an idol of Jesus as a magical savior which would leave the ego firmly in charge and removes the threat that we could change our minds by choosing against the ego.

Then in Chapter 8, he elaborates on this further in two passages, of which the first one reads:
quote
When you meet anyone, remember it is a holy encounter. As you see him you will see yourself. As you treat him you will treat yourself. As you think of him you will think of yourself. Never forget this, for in him you will find yourself or lose yourself. Whenever two Sons of God meet, they are given another chance at salvation. Do not leave anyone without giving salvation to him and receiving it yourself. For I am always there with you, in remembrance of you.
unquote (ACIM:T-8.III.4)


And in this way he reminds us of the reality of his presence to us in every encounter, if we would merely choose the guidance of the Holy Spirit, and thus recognize our Self in our brothers, by trusting in the spirit in them. And so his presence is with us in every encounter, for every encounter is a Holy Encounter, if we do not let the ego's specialness limit it.

Copyright, © 2007 Rogier F. van Vlissingen. All rights reserved.

The Holy Encounter

As Jan Willem Kaiser wrote at one point "... therefore every encounter between people is holy." (The book in question is not yet avalable in English.)

The Course discusses this concept extensively also in Chapter 8, Section 3, The Holy Encounter, where it says among other things:

quote
When you meet anyone, remember it is a holy encounter. 2 As you see him you will see yourself. 3 As you treat him you will treat yourself. 4 As you think of him you will think of yourself. 5 Never forget this, for in him you will find yourself or lose yourself. 6 Whenever two Sons of God meet, they are given another chance at salvation. 7 Do not leave anyone without giving salvation to him and receiving it yourself. 8 For I am always there with you, in remembrance of
unquote


Making the other choice will be facilitated by our growing awareness as we practice the Course, that the ego is never an original thought. In order to choose to be part of the whole, you have to have had the whole first, which the ego then splits off from and denies its existence. So in the world we then make up every encounter we have is a reminder of our self which gives us the choice to act out the ego-choice all over again, and engage in another episode of the ego's soap opera, or to choose the Holy Spirit as our guide to lead us home and our brother with us, as the love we now reflect in our actions is extended through us. Hence lesson 342 says:

quote
Brother, forgive me now. 2 I come to you to take you home with me. 3 And as we go, the world goes with us on our way to God.
unquote (ACIM:W-342.2:1-3)

The Course states in the "Hero" of the Dream section:
quote
How willing are you to escape effects of all the dreams the world has ever had? 2 Is it your wish to let no dream appear to be the cause of what it is you do? 3 Then let us merely look upon the dream's beginning, for the part you see is but the second part, whose cause lies in the first. 4 No one asleep and dreaming in the world remembers his attack upon himself.
unquote (ACIM:T-27.VIII.4:1-4)

And so it is in every encounter that we have in the world, we are not in touch with our own choice to see ourselves as an individual first, and thus our brother as a stranger, outside ourselves, whom we accuse of stealing the peace of God from us, and we are intent on getting it back either by seduction (special love) or by attack (special hate). As we act this out, we are seeing only the effect in the dream, and not our choice (for the ego) which caused the dream in the first place.  And so it is we need a reminder that every encounter indeed is a holy encounter, in which we always have the opportunity to "choose once again," and choose to go home with our brother instead of perpetuating the ego's drama.

Should we choose to replace the miracle impulses with physical action, and choose the ego's drama, the Course discusses some of the consequences in the last section of Chapter 1, The Distortion of Miracle Impulses as follows:

quote
Your distorted perceptions produce a dense cover over miracle impulses, making it hard for them to reach your own awareness. 2 The confusion of miracle impulses with physical impulses is a major perceptual distortion. 3 Physical impulses are misdirected miracle impulses. 4 All real pleasure comes from doing God's Will. 5 This is because not doing it is a denial of Self. 6 Denial of Self results in illusions, while correction of the error brings release from it. 7 Do not deceive yourself into believing that you can relate in peace to God or to your brothers with anything external.
unquote (ACIM:T-1.VII.1:1-7)

And so in every encounter we can choose to experience yet once again that we cannot truly relate to our brothers in peace with anything external, however much we try. The important thing about this is that we start to see that there is a continuous opportunity to make the other choice. This realization closely relates to the Course's observation in the section The Ego and False Autonomy:

quote
It is reasonable to ask how the mind could ever have made the ego. 2 In fact, it is the best question you could ask. 3 There is, however, no point in giving an answer in terms of the past because the past does not matter, and history would not exist if the same errors were not being repeated in the present. 4 Abstract thought applies to knowledge because knowledge is completely impersonal, and examples are irrelevant to its understanding. 5 Perception, however, is always specific, and therefore quite concrete.
unquote (ACIM:T-4.II.1)

And it is in our relationships that as children from the ego we always seek to reenact the past, and set ourselves up as a victim all over again, firmly believing we are overcoming the past, when in fact we are setting ourselves up to repeat it, unless and until we make the other choice, which breaks us free of our "predestination," and sets us on the way to freedom with our brother. On this path in one form or another we come to what the Course describes as the holiest spot on earth:

quote
The holiest of all the spots on earth is where an ancient hatred has become a present love. 2 And They come quickly to the living temple, where a home for Them has been set up. 3 There is no place in Heaven holier. 4 And They have come to dwell within the temple offered Them, to be Their resting place as well as yours. 5 What hatred has released to love becomes the brightest light in Heaven's radiance. 6 And all the lights in Heaven brighter grow, in gratitude for what has been restored.
unquote (ACIM:t-26.IX.6)

And so it is that it is in our very relationships, in what is "in front of our face," as the Thomas Gospel expresses it, that we have the sacred opportunity for healing, whenever we choose the Holy Spirit as our guide. The comment about the Distortion of Miracle Impulses that was cited above reflects how the recognition of our Self, which is inherent in every Encounter is immediately hi-jacked by the ego and translated into a transaction at the bodily level, where communication is by definition impossible, and by nature that is the ego's goal to prevent communication, since that rests on unity, and a denial of the separation.

Copyright, © 2006 Rogier F. van Vlissingen. All rights reserved.

From Thomas to Jefferson, and on to The Five Gospels

Under the title of this essay the reader will find a link to the Jefferson Bible, which is now available on the web in its entirety, including some of the introductory materials. So far my favorite edition of the Jefferson Bible is the one from Beacon Press in 1989, which has an introduction by Forrest Church and an afterword by Jaroslav Pelikan. It is a pleasant edition, and fairly serviceable, but it also has some annoying inconsistencies.

To wit, in the introduction Forrest Church adduces some of the crucial correspondence in which Jefferson provided an accounting for his purpose and his method in the compilation. However, where Jeffersons purpose was clearly an attempt to hear the teachings of Jesus amidst the din of the teachings about him by Paul and those who followed, it was inevitable that he should dismiss the writings of Paul from consideration, as he did the entire Old Testament, as well as most of the rest of the New. Pelikan in his afterword addresses Jefferson's frame of mind in this regard in the context of the Enlightenment, and quotes from a choice passage about Paul in Jefferson's April 13th 1820 letter to William Short, which in the original reads as follows:

... I separate, therefore, the gold from the dross; restore to Him the former, and leave the latter to the stupidity of some, and roguery of others of His disciples. Of this band of dupes and impostors, Paul was the great Coryphaeus, and first corrupter of the doctrines of Jesus. These palpable interpolations and falsifications of His doctrines, led me to try to sift them apart. I found the work obvious and easy, and that His past composed the most beautiful morsel of morality which has been given to us by man. The syllabus is therefore of His doctrines, not all of mine. I read them as I do those of other ancient and modern moralists, with a mixture of approbation and dissent...


Regrettably, while Church does include part of this very letter in the introduction, he truncates it after "... and roguery of others of His disciples," without even indicating with an ellipsis that something was left off, and so, when you try to find the letter Pelikan quotes in the afterword, you will be at a loss for this very relevant material, unless you did as I did and turn to the Internet. Pelikan meanwhile disappoints us a bit by his seeming upset at the daring of the third US President in his editing, which seems unwarranted, since Jefferson's honest purpose was to hear the words of the teacher, without the distortions of later commentators and editors that seemed obvious to him. Other than that, this is a nice edition.

The important point of Jefferson's work and results is first and foremost that anyone who wanted to try to understand Jesus could have done what Jefferson did, and dismissed the theological and interpretive framing of the stories, focusing on the words themselves, and following their own intuition as to the consistency of his teachings. It is very lovely to see how Jefferson even notes that he does not necessarily agree with all of what he thinks Jesus said, but simply focuses on trying to hear the consistency of the material, and leaves off anything that appears spurious. And by doing so he ends up with an edition which now, two hundred years later, and with the benefit of hindsight we should call truly remarkable. One way of looking at just how remarkable it was, is to realize the very high level of correspondence with the Thomas Gospel, which would not be discovered until almost a hundred and fifty years later. And yet we now see that the Thomas Gospel has a higher level than authenticity than the canonical materials, thus indirectly vindicating Jefferson's attempt at least in large part.

Thomas Jefferson in his editing certainly did not fall for the temptation which The Jesus Seminar points out in the introduction to its publication The Five Gospels, which is a remarkable attempt to bring together in one volume the canonical gospels and Thomas, in a very lively new translation, relatively free of theological prejudice. In the introduction on what they call the seven pillars of critical Bible scholarship, they end with warning us for a temptation they describe as follows: "Beware of finding a Jesus entirely congenial to you." (The Five Gospels, p. 5) As students of A Course In Miracles, we might see this admonition as a wonderful corollary to the various teachings in the Course which urge us to come up to Jesus' level in lieu of pulling Jesus down to our level. Christian theology has always busied itself with pulling Jesus down into the world, and explaining him in those terms, the path of spiritual growth does the opposite by listening to Jesus and letting him pull us up to his level. One specific passage in the Course stands out in this regard, in Lesson 80, Let me recognize my problems have been solved, and it goes as follows:

quote
If you are willing to recognize your problems, you will recognize that you have no problems. 2 Your one central problem has been answered, and you have no other. 3 Therefore, you must be at peace. 4 Salvation thus depends on recognizing this one problem, and understanding that it has been solved. 5 One problem, one solution. 6 Salvation is accomplished. 7 Freedom from conflict has been given you. 8 Accept that fact, and you are ready to take your rightful place in God's plan for salvation.
Your only problem has been solved! 2 Repeat this over and over to yourself today, with gratitude and conviction. 3 You have recognized your only problem, opening the way for the Holy Spirit to give you God's answer. 4 You have laid deception aside, and seen the light of truth. 5 You have accepted salvation for yourself by bringing the problem to the answer. 6 And you can recognize the answer, because the problem has been identified.
unquote (ACIM:W-80.1-2)

Or to put it in more philosophical terms, the world's theologies are always dualistic, since they directly or indirectly make the world real, preferably explicitly by blaming God for creating it. Jesus on the other hand teaches pure non-dualism, and his teaching of forgiveness, which we now have in much greater depth in the form of A Course In Miracles, teaches us the way out.
Yet even today compromise of the Course's teachings with various attempts to still make the world real is as widespread as it was in the early days of emergent Christianity.

Meanwhile, to return to our consideration of the traditional textual material, since The Jesus Seminar did put Mark up front - an editorial revision of the New Testament which was long overdue - they might as well have put Thomas ahead of that. This is not mere form. Our reading of Mark most of all would change forever if we should read the Thomas Gospel first. The minimal Pauline varnish present in Mark, such as verbiage about the symbolism of the Eucharist, would soon chip away, and we might see a significant shift in our view of Jesus, in which the Markan account preserves a freshness that is increasingly edited out in the later Gospels.

In summary, The Five Gospels is a remarkable book indeed, and truly perhaps the best source available today to access the historical documents about Jesus. And aside from the undeniable fact of the influence of the King James Bible on the English language, and therefore a certain need to stay conversant with it if only for the sake of literary references, such as those in the Course, this might be my favorite Bible edition, right next to the little gem that is the Jefferson Bible.


Copyright, © 2006 Rogier F. van Vlissingen. All rights reserved.

Duality all over again

The following started with a thread on Course Talk, in which I took part, titled One in Nature, not in number. Subsequently I decided that it might pay to expand upon my response, since this is an issue that appears to come up with some frequency. The original writer posed that the notion of "One in nature, not in number," might be a way of understanding the Course's concept of oneness on an operational level. It should be evident to attentive readers that much rather it turns the Course teaching on its ear.

Amidst what seems to be a cottage industry of Course interpretation, which makes the silent assumption that the Course should need interpretation, one of the favorite pastimes boils down to finding byways to re-introduce and justify the ego's implied belief in duality, and thus to have your cake and eat it too: appearing to embrace the Course, and honoring the ego and the world at the same time. Besides the clarifications of this issue that can be found in the Course, which are too numerous to repeat here, it may be helpful however to consider some other issues, both historical and current.

As is now evident from internal evidence the original teaching of Jesus was better preserved in the Thomas Gospel than in the so-called "canonical" gospels, where the needs of the story-tellers, and the first stirrings of theological interpretation of Jesus' teaching are beginning to be felt, which finds its origin (within the canonical tradition) in the writings of Paul, whose early work pre-dates the synoptics, but not Thomas. And of course the internal consistency of GoTh reflects a non-dualism that is completely in-line with ACIM.

Historically Paul then lays the ground work for a theological interpretation of Jesus, and lays the foundation for what we call Christianity, including such key notions as the Second Coming meaning Jesus' return to this world, rather than us following him out of it. By striving for a consistent interpretation in ego terms, i.e. consistency in form, the inner consistency of Jesus' teachings, never mind the whole Biblical tradition, is compromised and a forced consistency in form is theologically imposed on the Bible as God's revealed word. One way of looking at it very bluntly is that if the Bible does not have a consistent meaning an emerging priesthood does not have any jobsecurity. Essentially the "mysteries of faith" arise wherever it is impossible to explain a non-dualistic teaching in dualistic terms, and hence these "mysteries" are jealously guarded by the priesthood and not open to question, rather accepting them becomes the basis of their brand of salvation, which as we all know has proven to be highly marketable, in by now some 25,000 flavors. All these varieties of interpretation are ultimately possible only because there can not be a consistent way of explaining non-dualism in dualistic terms.

Much of the misunderstandings around the Course amount to the same issue. The Course is consistent in content, not in form, for reasons it carefully explains, namely our reality is non-dualistic, but we're having this dream of a dualistic existence, and the Course meets us where we are. Now if a Course-theology is attempted to impose a consistency in form on the Course which it doesn't have, the result could conceivably be 25,000 "Course denominations," because the answers multiply once we go down this path (just add yeast, sugar, and some global warming, and give it 2,000 years). Likewise people who make their living interpreting the Course along such lines have need of justifying their interepretations by speaking of Ken Wapnick's "interpretation," when that is the one thing Ken Wapnick does not do. Instead he painstakingly explains the Course on the Course's terms, following strictly and only its strict consistency of content, and allowing for its apparent contradictions in form, by understanding obvious metaphors metaphorically.

Obviously to the ego this is intolerable, and hence the not infrequent, but entirely unjustified notion of Ken's "interpretation" of the Course is given currency. Strictly speaking one could only use that term by either not fully reading the Course in one piece, or if the writer perhaps did not read English very well. And so the groundwork is laid for many possible interpretations, as in fact the Course clearly explains the ego will always do, in pursuing the first law of chaos, that the truth is different for everyone. The prime example of this is surely Robert Perry's book "One Course, Two Visions," the title of which surely says enough.

A recent episode in Miracles Magazine concerning the work of Gary Renard reflects the same issues. If nothing else Gary is very forceful in upholding and presenting the nondualism of the Course and does not compromise that message one iota, and he came under attack in Miracles Magazine by a parade of writers who dedicate themselves to presentations of the Course in which they sneak in non-dualism in various forms and degrees through the side door, as has been proudly documented in the above book, which by its title alone makes a joke of the internal consistency of the Course.

The bottom line on all of this is that the mistakes are the same now as they were two thousand years ago, and simply demonstrate in so many ways how the ego in all of us constantly seeks to compromise the uncompromising nature of reality, in order to hang on to the validity of the self-concept it wants to sell us on. And as long as we keep wanting to be sold on it, we'll buy for it is only our choice that makes and empowers the ego. And as the Course points out, our fondness for it can be understood only because we made it.

Copyright, © 2006 Rogier F. van Vlissingen. All rights reserved.

The Parable of DU

"The Disappearance of the Universe," or "DU" as it is affectionately known among ACIM literati, is a metaphor, just like anything else is metaphor, once we begin to appreciate that all duality is always metaphor.

And presently we wait with bated breath on the sequel, "Your Immortal Reality," and some exchanges have already begun on-line with people who have read the book already.  I am in fact reading it as I write down these notes.

It may make sense to take a step back and look at the metaphor presented by DU. In it Gary, a lovable, stumbling, and bumbling fellow who is not hard to empathize or identify with, follows his spiritual longings as best he can without making any particularly dramatic headway, until at one point two people show up in his life, seemingly out of nowhere, in order to help Gary make major progress in his spiritual work, and who towards the end of the story reveal themselves as his own self from another (future) incarnation, and formerly the apostle Thomas, as well as well as the former apostle Thaddeus, in the form of one of his future incarnations, who however has a relationship with Gary in this current lifetime in another form, which he leaves for Gary (and us) to guess about.

The point perhaps is that it is our own self and closest friends showing up as help on the path, in whatever form that is most helpful to us, and of course never one that induces fear, and... as some episodes make clear sometimes even without us knowing it. As much as people seem to think that if only they had such apparitions in their lives, then they would really believe, the truth is most of us would call the police. For Gary apparently the fear was low enough that a deeper feeling of recognition set in, and he tuned into his sense of familiarity and trust, instead of fear. Along the way in the story it is evident that even if they're not there physically, they are still helping him in other dimensions. The implication is that as we are healing we do get lots of help, in whatever form we can accept and recognize, though often we don't know it, or at least not right away.

Some of the comments that have been floating around on the forums seem to note the "exclusivity" of Arten and Pursah to Gary, which seems like a spurious comment, for my identities from prior lives would be unique to me as A&P are to Gary, though in the long run of course we represent one self. But the bottom line is the implication of the book is not about
A&P excluding us from the kingdom as such comments imply, but simply that Gary has his A&P, and we all have our own "self" from other times watching over us like a guardian angel, we just may not have a physical experience like Gary did. The message is hardly that he's got it, and we're lost at sea. Rather, if a poor shlepp like Gary can get it, so can we, so there's hope.

So for one thing the message is that if Gary can, so can we, and on another level perhaps we cannot meet Arten and Pursah in the way Gary experienced them but we can meet Gary either through his book or in a workshop, and we all have our own Artens and Pursah's, if we know it or not, right in our own lives, that is the message of hope the book conveys, that we don't go this path alone. Gary is the demonstration of that. And Thomas Logion 52 may be recalled at this point too, for it is a favorite ego trick to ask for something more suitable (to the ego), in order to deny what's right in front of us. Ignoring the opportunity for salvation that's in front of us, until a better one arrives is standard ego fare. To the ego no path will ever be good enough,  unless the ego stays in charge, and that is why it always seeks to have the final "imprimatur," and that is why only dead prophets are safe in its view.

GoTh. 52 (GR version):
The disciples said to him, "Twenty-four prophets have spoken in Israel, and they all spoke of you." He said to them: "You have disregarded the living one who is in your presence, and have spoken of the dead."


Copyright, © 2006 Rogier F. van Vlissingen. All rights reserved.

Now about those Tongues

After ten years of talking about the French translation of the Course, which finally arrived this spring, I finally did my first introductory workshop at the Gallery of my friend Samuel Augustin (www.kreyolart.com) on Saturday 08/12/2006. In the process I've started to read the book in French just to get "tuned in" to the French word choices, in order hopefully to make my usage consistent with the translated Course, rather than making it up from English and risk causing confusion.

Like always, this undertaking turns out to be a gift to myself, for suddenly even the first few chapters of the Course are hitting me with a fresh power that really blew my mind. I guess it is easier to read right over what it says in English for you think you know it already. And so, right from the outset,this experience seems to be offering a new twist on the idea that you teach what you need to learn.

I have not yet dared to really start reading the Course in my native Dutch. Something is holding me back, it just seems odd or too pedestrian in Dutch.

Having said that, I am profoundly impressed with the fact that translating is impossible, and would recommend to any foreign language students that if they can do it at all they should consult the English text from time to time. From the notes in all the foreign editions it is clear that the greatest sacrifice is the link to the KJV of the Bible, which seems so organic with the Course in English, but is lost in the translation to any other language.

Other interesting issues turn up as well, such as the fact that Dutch does not really have a viable word for "mind," and so a neologism was created for the purpose of the translation. I'm sure that my further work with the translations will lead to some interesting new observations from time to time.

Copyright, © 2006 Rogier F. van Vlissingen. All rights reserved.

Misquoting Jesus, Bart D. Ehrman

Ehrman gives us another gem, both for its ability to provide a readable introduction to some heavy duty scholarly stuff, as well as for his honesty in terms of his own growth process, coming from a fundamentalist background, taking the Bible as the literal word of God, to learning the fallibility of the processes which have given us what we think is the Bible. From being The Book, it becomes a book. An interesting book perhaps, but just a book.

Besides giving us a lively understanding of the trees, the micro issues of textual criticism, and thus helping any reader to demythologize the cult of the Bible in Western tradition, he also backs up to show us the forest and helps us to disaggregate the books and traditions of the Bible, so we can become more critical readers on the level of meaning and the coloration of certain books and authors within the Bible.

Christianity has always strived to interpret the Bible as a whole, and then ends up disagreeing about which whole, and splitting up in a thousand different sects over that. I will never forget two churches at the end of one particular dike in my native Holland which disagreed over exactly one word in one sentence. But feelings ran high over that one word, I assure you.

To students of the Course some understanding of these issues may be helpful to us, since it underlines some of the corrections provided in the Course, where Jesus in some cases out and out corrects the Bible, and in other cases suggest simply different ways of interpreting the Bible. Having an appreciation for the fallibility of the tradition based on textual criticism makes it easier to appreciate where he's coming from in this regard.

When Ehrman gets around to discussing the view from 30,000 feet of the books of the NT at the end of his book, he starts by sorting out the relationships of the four canonical gospels, and making clear their chronological order, as well as how much they are NOT saying the same things. The high point perhaps, which is a point that has escaped Christians for too long already is when he says:
The message of Paul is both like and unlike what we find in the Gospels (he doesn't say much about Jesus' words or deeds, for example, but focuses on what for Paul were the critical issues, that Christ died on the cross and was raised from the dead). (Misquoting Jesus, p. 215.)

Coming from the standpoint of A Course In Miracles, it can be even more startling to realize the levels of distortion we are subjected to in the Biblical tradition, for translations are another layer of complication, and not only in the sense Ehrman identifies. It is very evident that the translations compounded the problems of understanding immeasurably, and this is evident even when you consult standard works like Bauer's Dictionary of NT Greek, for by treating NT Greek as a dialect and ignoring the time element within it, a homogeneity in usage is suggested which is not really there. One of the key examples of that is the word "metanoia," which in Jesus' usage is quite obviously what it means literally namely "change of mind," but in the usage of Paul it becomes more and more "repentance" and "conversion" as the focus shifts to a dialectic about Jesus, and  a belief in Jesus the Savior, and the Christian version of God, in a way which is a more rational process and a worldly confession of beliefs, not a following of Jesus in changing our mind like he was showing us to do in his life. To highlight this issue even more, the following passage from the Psychotherapy pamphlet, that belongs organically to ACIM as well, can be helpful:

Yet it is not the awareness of God that constitutes a reasonable goal for psychotherapy. 2 This will come when psychotherapy is complete, for where there is forgiveness truth must come. 3 It would be unfair indeed if belief in God were necessary to psychotherapeutic success. 4 Nor is belief in God a really meaningful concept, for God can be but known. 5 Belief implies that unbelief is possible, but knowledge of God has no true opposite. 6 Not to know God is to have no knowledge, and it is to this that all unforgiveness leads. 7 And without knowledge one can have only belief.
                                                                       (ACIM:P-2.II.4)

The ego's God, which is a projection is in need of belief, and so is Paul's reconstruction of Jesus. Thus the pervasive need to proselytize is merely part of the symptomology of another set of ego beliefs because they are not based on truth. After all, truth needs no defense, and is not dependent on anyone "accepting" it.
Pulling Jesus down into the ego-realm of belief/unbelief, is accomplished by focusing on the words, not the experience and the inner knowing of truth. The Course's answer to that issue is:

1. Strictly speaking, words play no part at all in healing. 2 The motivating factor is prayer, or asking. 3 What you ask for you receive. 4 But this refers to the prayer of the heart, not to the words you use in praying. 5 Sometimes the words and the prayer are contradictory; sometimes they agree. 6 It does not matter. 7 God does not understand words, for they were made by separated minds to keep them in the illusion of separation. 8 Words can be helpful, particularly for the beginner, in helping concentration and facilitating the exclusion, or at least the control, of extraneous thoughts. 9 Let us not forget, however, that words are but symbols of symbols. 10 They are thus twice removed from reality. (ACIM:M-21.1)

And in the final end ACIM makes it completely clear that it is the inner experience, and not the words and the book which matter, when it says: Forget this world, forget this course, and come with wholly empty hands unto your God. (ACIM:W-189.7:5)


Conversely then it should become clear to us by experience that even the choices of words in translating the NT, and in some cases even the conclusions in textual criticism might be very different if an understanding of Jesus' teachings were a prerequisite, rather than merely a degree in Greek. And thus for the Course student who was perhaps raised with Christian influences once they have a solid footing in the Course, they might decide to do some time what Jesus recommends in passing a few times, which is to read the Bible from the point of view of the Holy Spirit's thought system of love, insteady of from a stand point of the ego's fear, and a whole different picture emerges.

Copyright, © 2006 Rogier F. van Vlissingen. All rights reserved.