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.

Of John the Baptist and the Prophet Elijah

The beautiful relationship you have with all your brothers is a part of you because it is a part of God Himself. Are you not sick, if you deny yourself your wholeness and your health, the Source of help, the Call to healing and the Call to heal? Your savior waits for healing, and the world waits with him. Nor are you apart from it. For healing will be one or not at all, its oneness being where the healing is. What could correct for separation but its opposite? There is no middle ground in any aspect of salvation. You accept it wholly or accept it not. What is unseparated must be joined. And what is joined cannot be separate. (ACIM:T-28.VII.2)

As the Course makes clear throughout, everything happens in the context of our relationships, and in this life every relationship starts out as a special relationship, because the ego is our primary driver, until we begin to change our minds. A special relationships starts from the perception of lack, which inspires the idea that the other has something that I don't, and thus the impetus to the relationship is the filling of that lack. Inevitably, the day comes when the relationship partner disappoints, because he or she is always more and/or different than we bargained for. At that point relationships are broken off, and new ones started. If we should be so lucky, one day it will dawn on us that the game never changes, and moreover that it gets boring after a while.

With A Course in Miracles, the very practicality of forgiveness as the way out of this hell, is taught by learning to separate fact from fiction, in the sense that the ego's emotions are always fiction, because they are an interpretation of circumstances on the basis of the self-interest of an entity--our presumed individual identity--that is impermanent at best, and hence they merely are such stuff as dreams are made of.

Forgiveness, Course style, untangles the tangled emotions and eventually frees us from their stranglehold and leads us on the way back home. Along with the process of learning to see our brother sinless, by letting go of our grievances, we are learning to see the face of Christ in our brother, which is the face of who we are as an innocent Son of God. In the final stages of this process, we experience by definition with one particular brother the letting go of our last projections, as part of our forgiveness process. This is the deepest point, the proverbial darkest hour before the dawn, and in the Biblical account of the baptism in the River Jordan, it is symbolized by that baptism, an immersion in the "river of life" of our emotions, to the point of suffocation, before we see the Heavens break and hear God's Voice say to us that you are my beloved son, in whom I am well pleased. At that point we are then hearing the voice of guiltlessness, because we have then remembered who we are.

In this sense then Elijah or John the Baptist, as the Messenger who precedes the savior, symbolize that one brother on our way back home who becomes our final teacher by evoking a depth of emotion in us, which we then choose against, one last time, and that is when the Sky breaks, and we finally see the savior. The name Yehochanan (John) is very symbolic, God gives blessings--in it lies the recognition that our very salvation lies in these final forgiveness lessons, and that what the ego judged so badly, is in fact our biggest forgiveness lesson, and our final way out of the ego's hell. This happens only at the point of total immersion to the point of suffocation in that river of ego emotions, all rooted in fleeting awareness of time that is the River Jordan.

The fourth obstacle to be surmounted hangs like a heavy veil before the face of Christ. Yet as His face rises beyond it, shining with joy because He is in His Father's Love, peace will lightly brush the veil aside and run to meet Him, and to join with Him at last. For this dark veil, which seems to make the face of Christ Himself like to a leper's, and the bright Rays of His Father's Love that light His face with glory appear as streams of blood, fades in the blazing light beyond it when the fear of death is gone. (ACIM:T19.IV.D.2)

The key to the "parables" that come to us, and also of the story of the baptism in the River Jordan is the realization that it is all about us. We are not forgiving anybody our there, we are forgiving ourselves for our mistaken choice for the ego, which choice merely resulted in the false perception that we were outside of Heaven, a perception we then "make real" by seeing a whole universe of individual identities "out there" who are all outside of Heaven, and fighting each others for the spoils of the "nothing" that is the world. As long as we are not willing to forgive our silly mistake, we keep seeing the world in terms of "survival of the fittest," and ourselves in conflict with all our brothers. In that deepest ego-pit, that moment of immersion in our deepest emotional despair to the point of suffocating, we finally let go of our judgment of the world. This is the final decision moment when we let go of the last vestiges of our ego's judgments, and learn from our baptist that God gives Blessings, and as we finally relinquish the ego completely, we emerge from the pits to see the "face of Christ," in all our brothers, because we ourselves remember who we are in truth. In the Course's words "I am still as God created me." (ACIM Lessons 201-220: I am not a body, I am free. For I am still as God created me.) In the words of the New Testament, "Thou art my Son, in whom I am well pleased."

And now we say "Amen." For Christ has come to dwell in the abode You set for Him before time was, in calm eternity. The journey closes, ending at the place where it began. No trace of it remains. Not one illusion is accorded faith, and not one spot of darkness still remains to hide the face of Christ from anyone. Thy Will is done, complete and perfectly, and all creation recognizes You, and knows You as the only Source it has. Clear in Your likeness does the light shine forth from everything that lives and moves in You. For we have reached where all of us are one, and we are home, where You would have us be. (ACIM:T-31.VIII.12) 

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.