That was Bill Thetford's expression for the insanity that seemed to start swirling around ACIM right from the beginning. Today it has become a complete industry. I do not know how to deal with it, other than just ignore it, or address it clearly whenever it comes up.
One of my favorite comments from Ken Wapnick concerns the issue of some students who think they want to find a therapist who practices the Course, to which he invariably says: "If you need a therapist, please just pick a good one, and don't pick him because he would be a Course student." And that sums it up quite nicely, for a simple reductio ad absurdum would lead you to the notion that you would need ACIM-certified doctors, car mechanics, plumbers, and cleaning ladies, to name but a few. Conversely you might just as well look for a therapist with red hair. You can't make those decisions by proxy, never mind what they are.
It all adds up to the same insane confusion of content and form which led the early Christians to set themselves aside and make the teachings of Jesus into a religion, instead of practicing what he said, and following him in content, in spirit. Whether on the weekend you watch football, or study ACIM has nothing to do with the price of beans.
In the current literary landscape I would think perhaps the enlightenment trilogy by Jed McKenna, published at The Wise Fool Press might be the best antidote against this particular form of insanity. If nothing else they make it very clear by implication that ACIM has nothing to do with it. If it happens to be your path, it is a means to an end, it may serve some people, not others, but in the end it has nothing to do with the price of beans. There are many paths, as the Course itself clearly reminds us of, not to mention it's profound message in Lesson 189, when it says: "Forget this world, forget this course, and come with wholly empty hands unto your God." (ACIM:W-189.7:5) In other words, you use the railing to climb to the top of the stairs, but once you are there, you don't take the railing with you. You let go of it, and you walk onto the particular floor of the building you are in.
The perfect corollary to this is when the Course says in its Preface: "It is not intended to become the basis for another cult. Its only purpose is to provide a way in which some people will be able to find their own Internal Teacher." and a bit further down it elaborates even more:
"The Course makes no claim to finality, nor are the Workbook lessons intended to bring the student's learning to completion. At the end, the reader is left in the hands of his or her own Internal Teacher, Who will direct all subsequent learning as He sees fit. While the Course is comprehensive in scope, truth cannot be limited to any finite form, as is clearly recognized in the statement at the end of the Workbook:
This Course is a beginning, not an end...No more specific lessons are assigned, for there is no more need of them. Henceforth, hear but the Voice for God...He will direct your efforts, telling you exactly what to do, how to direct your mind, and when to come to Him in silence, asking for His sure direction and His certain Word (Workbook, p. 487)."
That really sums it up, right at the outset. Meanwhile the world blithely ignores these messages, and probably as I'm writing this, someone is developing Course-branded ski jackets or some such, but we would do well to be mindful of the fact that the only real thing to do is to dedicate ourselves to the relationship with the one Internal Teacher. If anyone can help you with the Course, fine, but the minute you lose focus on that Internal Teacher, you become a follower of people, not a student of the Course.
Along similar lines I remember a workshop I organized with Nouk Sanchez & Tomas Vieira, around their book Take Me To Truth, on a break I heard a comment from the audience about finding a better partner to study ACIM with, which for all the same reasons is not the point, for it is not about the words. It is about the inner practice. Of course it can be very helpful at times if you have someone who you trust in their work with the Course, who may be able to give you some useful feedback when you hit a bump in the road, but you don't have to be married to, or live with, that person for it to work. It is never about the person. It could be a comment you overhear on the bus one day, which gives you just the clue you needed, for the Internal Teacher will use any available channel, and our responsibility is just the willingness to listen, and follow the Internal Teacher.
In my own life, I had to confront this issue in a different way, when the person who I had seen as my spiritual teacher for about 25 years died. I was angry with God then. And yet at some level I did realize that I was confusing content and form, and that another channel would show up. Four years later I found ACIM, and through a dream experience I knew without a doubt that here was my answer. And the beauty is that the book itself says of itself that it's only a book, it is there only to be a help for those who use it, but the truth is within, as the likes of Socrates and Jesus, and Buddha have been teaching since the beginning of time.
Copyright, © 2008 Rogier F. van Vlissingen. All rights reserved.
Exploring ACIM in context of Abrahamic tradition.
"Questioning every value that we hold," with new readings of old familar terms
Exploration of biblical lore as metaphor, honoring the spirit of Johan Willem Kaiser, whose work was to lead me to recognize the authorship of the Course.
Thursday, January 24, 2008
Monday, August 20, 2007
Religion and Religions
Formal religion has no place in psychotherapy, but it also has no real place in religion. In this world, there is an astonishing tendency to join contradictory words into one term without perceiving the contradiction at all. The attempt to formalize religion is so obviously an ego attempt to reconcile the irreconcilable that it hardly requires elaboration here. Religion is experience; psychotherapy is experience. At the highest levels they become one. Neither is truth itself, but both can lead to truth. What can be necessary to find truth, which remains perfectly obvious, but to remove the seeming obstacles to true awareness? (ACIM: P-2.II.2)
I borrowed the title for this post from Jan Willem Kaiser. It is the title of a monograph and originally a presentation he gave at the Open Field Conferences in Holland in the 1960's. I've published several in translation under the title Four Open Field Books.
The topic is as relevant today as it was then, except to say that with the Course we can be even clearer now in some respects. The Course material quoted above (from the Psychotherapy pamphlet) makes a delightful quip about religion and religions.
The underlying point is this: religions in the plural, as worldly institutions, are the adaptations to the world of spiritual teachings, which in most cases were derived from teachers who were invariably misunderstood if not deliberately misconstrued, and whose teachings were adapted to worldly ends. The entire history of Christianity, starting from Paul's rationalizations which made Jesus' earthly life and presumed suffering as well as the notion of vicarious salvation the central focus, and which rendered Jesus' teachings fit to serve as a state religion under the emperor Constantine, later splintering in the Reformation under inter-European power struggles, all revolving around the politics of competing rulers, is political history, and has nothing to do with religion. The sophistry of modern "religious freedom," which seems to co-exist with a contrapuntal revival of a fundamentalism reminiscent of the Dark Ages, really is but the final, fractured form of the ego's relationship to a dualistic God, who is deemed to be the creator of this world, thus granting meaning to the ego's realm of the phenomenal world. The idea of God having created the world is essential to the world and to the ego, because it removes the objective reality of the world from question, and the theory of evolution does the same in non-religious terms.
The point here is that religion is experiential, and is only about what the Course would call the Holy Relationship, which in traditional language from the Jesus tradition is the First Commandment, to love our brothers as our Self and the Father above all. The Course describes this with the heavily symbolic expression of seeing the face of Christ in our brother, and the Holy Relationship.
Kaiser's article with this title, in many ways is probably the best definition of the Course anybody gave long before the Course arrived on the scene, and it is really an elaboration of another statement Kaiser made in one of his other books (as quoted in my The Gospel as a Spiritual Path, p. 115), which in itself sort of presaged the Course: "Presently the newly awakened psychology will gradually accomplish what pure religious devotion might have done: throw out Paul, and let Jesus in!" In other words, the point is to get disentangled from the ego's rationalizations parading as facts, and to take the risk of direct experience. I might add here that this article beats many current introductions to the Course, in essence because its author truly understood and represented the essence of Jesus' ministry as best he could understand it without the benefit of its modern variant in ACIM.
In the article Kaiser elaborates on the ego's self-justification which is the basis of our illusory experience, namely its fundamental drive to substitute its interpretations for the facts. He then goes on to describe religion as follows (p. 70 of Four Open Field Books):
"This is Religion, Service to God, and only those who are willing to drop all conceptions, theories, systems and methods will experience what it means and where it leads. This is the only true, universal Process of Liberation which tradition calls Transformation, which is then undergone in the Hands of the Supreme Himself.
No man will ever be able to define this mysterious Process, nor will any description of experiences under this process be comprehensible to outsiders or capable of being "used" by them.
This is Religion, Service to God, and it means the restoration and full development of the one vertical relationship, God and Man."
The crux of the problem is summed up in the Course in terms of the little willingness, which is our willingness to let go of the ego's judgment, the willingness to be wrong, which alone is required to honestly ask Jesus or the Holy Spirit for help. But the ego always attempts to jump back in. In another pithy description the Course describes this temptation as follows:
"Do not attempt to give the Holy Spirit what He does not ask, or you will add the ego to Him and confuse the two. He asks but little. It is He Who adds the greatness and the might. He joins with you to make the holy instant far greater than you can understand. It is your realization that you need do so little that enables Him to give so much." (ACIM:T-18.IV.1:6-10)
In short, since it is the ego's judgment which traps us in our substitute reality, the essence of the journey is to let go of it entirely, since the ego's judgment is entirely self-serving, capricious, and therefore not in our best interest. The Course's appeal to the intellect, since it is a very sound logical presentation, is merely a matter of hand holding along the way, for the Course's process is designed to lead us beyond the intellect entirely through our own first hand experience. Hence the workbook, setting us on a track to application of the Course's theory in our daily lives, is central to the curriculum, so much so that Jesus defines teachers of God as those who have completed the workbook at least once.
Kaiser, in his monograph quoted above also writes:
"The story of Theseus in Greek mythology is very instructive. After killing the Minotaur in the maze of impure human reasoning and feeling (the monster of lower urges in man), which he found thanks to the "thread" of logical thinking which Ariadne (Ariachne) had given him because she liked him. Theseus decides to take her with him as his bride.
But on his way "home" he gets the divine intimation that he must leave her behind in Naxos. He obeys but is so overcome with grief at his "infidelity" that he forgets to hoist the white sails, which were to be the token that he had returned a victor over the Minotaur. So when his father, waiting on the rock of illusion, saw the ship with black sails coming, he threw himself from the rocks and perished. THAT IS WHY THESEUS SUCCEEDED HIM AS KING.
Here it is. Accomplishment of the One Thing Needful demands more than we can bear. It is only going through apparent failure, utter darkness and despair, that man can come to an: "All is fulfilled."
If this does not happen the old "king." that is he who lives enslaved to the Minotaur, will not die but will go on reigning.
Alas, they who brought us new philosophies, new creeds, new ideologies, have never deserted "Ariachne" when the moment to do so had come.
They all hoisted "the white sails."
They all became famous and were hailed as glorious conquerors of evil. But the old "king" continued to reign. That is: things did not really change." (as quoted in: Four Open Field Books, p. 64)
And so, while the Course emphasizes Atonement without sacrifice, since we give up nothing to gain everything, we usually have the experience of loss simply because we think the ego and its baubles were quite something, and it takes us a while to appreciate that things are getting better when they seem to get worse from the standpoint of what we thought we knew.
The Course also offers various instructive suggestions as to what it means to leave the ego behind, using humor to help us overcome our resistance to do so, as in:
"The giving up of judgment, the obvious prerequisite for hearing God's Voice, is usually a fairly slow process, not because it is difficult, but because it is apt to be perceived as personally insulting. The world's training is directed toward achieving a goal in direct opposition to that of our curriculum. The world trains for reliance on one's judgment as the criterion for maturity and strength. Our curriculum trains for the relinquishment of judgment as the necessary condition of salvation."(ACIM:M-9.2:4-7)
The more we understand this issue and recognize it in ourselves, the more we will understand how important is the second step of the Course's forgiveness process, the asking for help from Jesus or the Holy Spirit in looking at the situation differently. Unless we truly surrender the ego's way of looking at things its way, and justifying its position, we cannot and will not truly ask the Holy Spirit for help, let alone rely on the Holy Spirit for the Answer. Only too often we keep filling in the blanks with the ego's answers. And so we think we know the Course and we hoist the white sails. This way we always surreptitiously end up with at best the ego's version of forgiveness, which the Course calls forgiveness to destroy.
This process is in fact the same that happened in early Christianity, when Jesus' teaching became rationalized into a system and an -ism, i.e. an organized religion, which served the rulers of the world quite well. This all started with the crystallization of a doctrinaire certainty about him, which effectively prevented us from doing what he asked, namely to pick up our "cross" and follow him. Instead we established a church based on the notion of an exclusive ownership of eternal truth, which simply became a power institution in the world, lording it over everyone, not to mention pursuing and attacking anyone who didn't buy the story. And the canon of the NT as interpreted by this emerging power structure, was held to represent that truth, based on the ludicrous presumption of direct transmission of the Jesus' teachings through the apostles. In other words, we claimed "we got it," we hoisted the white sails, and the old king (the ego) continued to rule.
This is how it goes every time when we pretend to ask the Holy Spirit for Help, but our ego really jumps in prematurely and starts filling in the anwers, and we "add the ego to Him," as the Course calls it. When we truly do ask for help, and wait for the Holy Spirit to provide the Answer in His time, we end up afterwards, looking behind us at nothing but the ashes of those once seemingly rock-solid ego beliefs. We could not let go of them, but little did we realize how much we suffered as a result of putting ourselves in chains, or how silly they would look after we let go of them.
Putting two and two together we can thus see that the historical phenomenon whereby genuine and universal spiritual teachings turn into "world" religions, is nothing but the ego's method of seemingly co-opting the very teachings that would threaten its existence, and giving them a different meaning in the process, just as we do when we turn forgiveness into "forgiveness to destroy."
And so the Course, while making a strong appeal to the intellect as part of its instruction, can and will lead us beyond it through its practice, and finally in Lesson 189:
"Simply do this: Be still, and lay aside all thoughts of what you are and what God is; all concepts you have learned about the world; all images you hold about yourself. Empty your mind of everything it thinks is either true or false, or good or bad, of every thought it judges worthy, and all the ideas of which it is ashamed. Hold onto nothing. Do not bring with you one thought the past has taught, nor one belief you ever learned before from anything. Forget this world, forget this course, and come with wholly empty hands unto your God."
And everything hinges on the "Little Willingness" to let go of our ego's judgments once and for all, but gratefully we only have to do it one miracle at a time, lest the fear were too great.
Copyright, © 2007 Rogier F. van Vlissingen. All rights reserved.
I borrowed the title for this post from Jan Willem Kaiser. It is the title of a monograph and originally a presentation he gave at the Open Field Conferences in Holland in the 1960's. I've published several in translation under the title Four Open Field Books.
The topic is as relevant today as it was then, except to say that with the Course we can be even clearer now in some respects. The Course material quoted above (from the Psychotherapy pamphlet) makes a delightful quip about religion and religions.
The underlying point is this: religions in the plural, as worldly institutions, are the adaptations to the world of spiritual teachings, which in most cases were derived from teachers who were invariably misunderstood if not deliberately misconstrued, and whose teachings were adapted to worldly ends. The entire history of Christianity, starting from Paul's rationalizations which made Jesus' earthly life and presumed suffering as well as the notion of vicarious salvation the central focus, and which rendered Jesus' teachings fit to serve as a state religion under the emperor Constantine, later splintering in the Reformation under inter-European power struggles, all revolving around the politics of competing rulers, is political history, and has nothing to do with religion. The sophistry of modern "religious freedom," which seems to co-exist with a contrapuntal revival of a fundamentalism reminiscent of the Dark Ages, really is but the final, fractured form of the ego's relationship to a dualistic God, who is deemed to be the creator of this world, thus granting meaning to the ego's realm of the phenomenal world. The idea of God having created the world is essential to the world and to the ego, because it removes the objective reality of the world from question, and the theory of evolution does the same in non-religious terms.
The point here is that religion is experiential, and is only about what the Course would call the Holy Relationship, which in traditional language from the Jesus tradition is the First Commandment, to love our brothers as our Self and the Father above all. The Course describes this with the heavily symbolic expression of seeing the face of Christ in our brother, and the Holy Relationship.
Kaiser's article with this title, in many ways is probably the best definition of the Course anybody gave long before the Course arrived on the scene, and it is really an elaboration of another statement Kaiser made in one of his other books (as quoted in my The Gospel as a Spiritual Path, p. 115), which in itself sort of presaged the Course: "Presently the newly awakened psychology will gradually accomplish what pure religious devotion might have done: throw out Paul, and let Jesus in!" In other words, the point is to get disentangled from the ego's rationalizations parading as facts, and to take the risk of direct experience. I might add here that this article beats many current introductions to the Course, in essence because its author truly understood and represented the essence of Jesus' ministry as best he could understand it without the benefit of its modern variant in ACIM.
In the article Kaiser elaborates on the ego's self-justification which is the basis of our illusory experience, namely its fundamental drive to substitute its interpretations for the facts. He then goes on to describe religion as follows (p. 70 of Four Open Field Books):
"This is Religion, Service to God, and only those who are willing to drop all conceptions, theories, systems and methods will experience what it means and where it leads. This is the only true, universal Process of Liberation which tradition calls Transformation, which is then undergone in the Hands of the Supreme Himself.
No man will ever be able to define this mysterious Process, nor will any description of experiences under this process be comprehensible to outsiders or capable of being "used" by them.
This is Religion, Service to God, and it means the restoration and full development of the one vertical relationship, God and Man."
The crux of the problem is summed up in the Course in terms of the little willingness, which is our willingness to let go of the ego's judgment, the willingness to be wrong, which alone is required to honestly ask Jesus or the Holy Spirit for help. But the ego always attempts to jump back in. In another pithy description the Course describes this temptation as follows:
"Do not attempt to give the Holy Spirit what He does not ask, or you will add the ego to Him and confuse the two. He asks but little. It is He Who adds the greatness and the might. He joins with you to make the holy instant far greater than you can understand. It is your realization that you need do so little that enables Him to give so much." (ACIM:T-18.IV.1:6-10)
In short, since it is the ego's judgment which traps us in our substitute reality, the essence of the journey is to let go of it entirely, since the ego's judgment is entirely self-serving, capricious, and therefore not in our best interest. The Course's appeal to the intellect, since it is a very sound logical presentation, is merely a matter of hand holding along the way, for the Course's process is designed to lead us beyond the intellect entirely through our own first hand experience. Hence the workbook, setting us on a track to application of the Course's theory in our daily lives, is central to the curriculum, so much so that Jesus defines teachers of God as those who have completed the workbook at least once.
Kaiser, in his monograph quoted above also writes:
"The story of Theseus in Greek mythology is very instructive. After killing the Minotaur in the maze of impure human reasoning and feeling (the monster of lower urges in man), which he found thanks to the "thread" of logical thinking which Ariadne (Ariachne) had given him because she liked him. Theseus decides to take her with him as his bride.
But on his way "home" he gets the divine intimation that he must leave her behind in Naxos. He obeys but is so overcome with grief at his "infidelity" that he forgets to hoist the white sails, which were to be the token that he had returned a victor over the Minotaur. So when his father, waiting on the rock of illusion, saw the ship with black sails coming, he threw himself from the rocks and perished. THAT IS WHY THESEUS SUCCEEDED HIM AS KING.
Here it is. Accomplishment of the One Thing Needful demands more than we can bear. It is only going through apparent failure, utter darkness and despair, that man can come to an: "All is fulfilled."
If this does not happen the old "king." that is he who lives enslaved to the Minotaur, will not die but will go on reigning.
Alas, they who brought us new philosophies, new creeds, new ideologies, have never deserted "Ariachne" when the moment to do so had come.
They all hoisted "the white sails."
They all became famous and were hailed as glorious conquerors of evil. But the old "king" continued to reign. That is: things did not really change." (as quoted in: Four Open Field Books, p. 64)
And so, while the Course emphasizes Atonement without sacrifice, since we give up nothing to gain everything, we usually have the experience of loss simply because we think the ego and its baubles were quite something, and it takes us a while to appreciate that things are getting better when they seem to get worse from the standpoint of what we thought we knew.
The Course also offers various instructive suggestions as to what it means to leave the ego behind, using humor to help us overcome our resistance to do so, as in:
"The giving up of judgment, the obvious prerequisite for hearing God's Voice, is usually a fairly slow process, not because it is difficult, but because it is apt to be perceived as personally insulting. The world's training is directed toward achieving a goal in direct opposition to that of our curriculum. The world trains for reliance on one's judgment as the criterion for maturity and strength. Our curriculum trains for the relinquishment of judgment as the necessary condition of salvation."(ACIM:M-9.2:4-7)
The more we understand this issue and recognize it in ourselves, the more we will understand how important is the second step of the Course's forgiveness process, the asking for help from Jesus or the Holy Spirit in looking at the situation differently. Unless we truly surrender the ego's way of looking at things its way, and justifying its position, we cannot and will not truly ask the Holy Spirit for help, let alone rely on the Holy Spirit for the Answer. Only too often we keep filling in the blanks with the ego's answers. And so we think we know the Course and we hoist the white sails. This way we always surreptitiously end up with at best the ego's version of forgiveness, which the Course calls forgiveness to destroy.
This process is in fact the same that happened in early Christianity, when Jesus' teaching became rationalized into a system and an -ism, i.e. an organized religion, which served the rulers of the world quite well. This all started with the crystallization of a doctrinaire certainty about him, which effectively prevented us from doing what he asked, namely to pick up our "cross" and follow him. Instead we established a church based on the notion of an exclusive ownership of eternal truth, which simply became a power institution in the world, lording it over everyone, not to mention pursuing and attacking anyone who didn't buy the story. And the canon of the NT as interpreted by this emerging power structure, was held to represent that truth, based on the ludicrous presumption of direct transmission of the Jesus' teachings through the apostles. In other words, we claimed "we got it," we hoisted the white sails, and the old king (the ego) continued to rule.
This is how it goes every time when we pretend to ask the Holy Spirit for Help, but our ego really jumps in prematurely and starts filling in the anwers, and we "add the ego to Him," as the Course calls it. When we truly do ask for help, and wait for the Holy Spirit to provide the Answer in His time, we end up afterwards, looking behind us at nothing but the ashes of those once seemingly rock-solid ego beliefs. We could not let go of them, but little did we realize how much we suffered as a result of putting ourselves in chains, or how silly they would look after we let go of them.
Putting two and two together we can thus see that the historical phenomenon whereby genuine and universal spiritual teachings turn into "world" religions, is nothing but the ego's method of seemingly co-opting the very teachings that would threaten its existence, and giving them a different meaning in the process, just as we do when we turn forgiveness into "forgiveness to destroy."
And so the Course, while making a strong appeal to the intellect as part of its instruction, can and will lead us beyond it through its practice, and finally in Lesson 189:
"Simply do this: Be still, and lay aside all thoughts of what you are and what God is; all concepts you have learned about the world; all images you hold about yourself. Empty your mind of everything it thinks is either true or false, or good or bad, of every thought it judges worthy, and all the ideas of which it is ashamed. Hold onto nothing. Do not bring with you one thought the past has taught, nor one belief you ever learned before from anything. Forget this world, forget this course, and come with wholly empty hands unto your God."
And everything hinges on the "Little Willingness" to let go of our ego's judgments once and for all, but gratefully we only have to do it one miracle at a time, lest the fear were too great.
Copyright, © 2007 Rogier F. van Vlissingen. All rights reserved.
Friday, July 27, 2007
Take me to Truth / Undoing the Ego
Yet he would not say anything except by way of parable, but would spell everything out to his own disciples. (Mk. 4:34 SV)
But without parable spake he not unto them: and when they were alone, he expounded all things to his disciples. (Mk. 4:34 KJV)
So here it is in the modern words of the Scholars Version, as well as in the traditional wording of the King James Version, take your pick. A Course in Miracles famously says in its Preface: "Its only purpose is to provide a way in which some people will be able to find their own Internal Teacher." (ACIM:Preface p. viii). The point is this that following Jesus means to develop our own relationship with that Internal Teacher, and thus learning the Course is not about reading the book, nor about workshops, seminars and study groups, but about doing our own daily work with the Course, in which the words finally come to life whenever we truly ask for help from Jesus or the Holy Spirit to see things Their way, not ours, or as the Course also puts it: "Instead, there is a wish to understand all things created as they really are. And it is recognized that all things must be first forgiven, and then understood." (ACIM:T-30.V.1:5-6) It is through forgiveness that Jesus truly teaches us his way of looking at them, for it is a requirement of the forgiveness process that we should give up our judgment of the situation, before we are available to hear the Holy Spirit's take on things, and only in that process does Jesus explain everything to his disciples (Course students), he did then and he does now. Of necessity this is how the process must work, since the only purpose of the ego's judgment is to keep Jesus outside, with all the doors and windows shuttered, in line with what the Course also says : "The world was made as an attack on God." (ACIM:W-pII.3.2:1)
Nouk Sanchez and Tomas Vieira in their new book Take Me To Truth/Undoing the Ego share with us from their experience as they went their own (tandem) path of spiritual growth with A Course In Miracles by living it and applying it in their daily lives, and sharing the experience with each other and other people around them. This book is many things. It is a powerful introduction to the Course in very non-religious terms, which may be helpful to some aspiring students. The book is also a comment on the practice of the Course's Development of Trust section (in the Manual for Teachers, Chapter 4, M-4.A3-8) , and in the process it provides clarification on the Course's teaching of the Holy Relationship. Both of these last two are very inspiring aspects of the Course's teachings, as much as they befuddle many readers, and the guidance provided in this book gives us an answer for living and learning by providing some very powerful hand holding to readers who may find themselves struggling with the same issues.
To paraphrase the Markan quotation above in simplest possible terms, to those outside (i.e. identified with the ego, living in duality) it all comes in parables (of necessity, since in duality all is parable, which we can read either with the ego or with the Holy Spirit). But to his disciples individually he explains everything, i.e. when we go inside, and enter into a relationship with Jesus or the Holy Spirit, clarity comes because we can now see those parables with the Holy Spirit, in the light of Reason - at that point they are first forgiven and then understood. It all comes down to letting go of projection, and climbing into the observer seat with J. Talking about it in Course study groups or workshops is not enough, practicing it is what matters.
The book Take Me To Truth was born from living the Course, and it is an open invitation to the reader to do the same. The first most notable aspect of this book is that it is simply a good introduction to the Course, or perhaps I should call it an "on-ramp" to the Course, for it manages to introduce Course concepts effectively without any of the religious language in the Course. Since the seeming Christian terminology of the Course can be hard to take for some, this may prove very helpful, though I do believe that while the Course is not everyone's path, if it is your path, getting clarity about your relationship with Jesus and/or the Holy Spirit is most likely part of that process, for a lot of cultural stereotypes, including the "bitter idol" we made of Jesus in Christianity is undone exactly through sorting out our initial tendency to misunderstand the terminology, which only appears to be Christian. This aspect would be my reason for calling the book more an on-ramp to the Course than an introduction in the narrow sense, but having said that, the authors accomplished something truly remarkable, without any real compromise to anything the Course teaches. Their approach ensures that this book is not a "Course book," in the narrow sense, for it ranges more widely than the Course, though the thought model of the Course is definitely its foundation. In short, people may read this book simply because it's good, and it may happen to introduce them to the Course in a novel way, if they weren't Course students already, but it's not a necessity.
The book effortlessly incorporates the notion of Byron Katie's "The Work," which indeed is a very solid and also non-Christian sounding approach to the Course's notion of thought reversal, of truly changing our mind through forgiveness. It is an elegant and simple process, which simply shunts the entire train of our thoughts on to a different track altogether. "The Work" is an utterly practical implementation of the Course's forgiveness process. The book leverages other ideas as well, in particular also the Enneagram as a personality inventory, which can be helpful in becoming more aware of one's patterns in this particular life we think we are leading just now, and becoming more conscious of the games we (tend to) play is a very important step in any process of spiritual growth. I have tried the Enneagram, specifically by taking the on-line test which the book recommends (RHETI 2.5), and it is interesting though personally I perhaps relate more easily to astrology, but for many people the Enneagram may be more readily accessible. I personally ended up getting an ambiguous result among several categories, the main benefit of which is that I get to retake the test for free all the time, which adds up to quite a bit of savings, at $10 each.
Next the book explores the dynamics of special relationships and the reasons why our special relationships can be the most powerful classroom for undoing the ego, since evidently all our own issues are comprised in them. Once again it clarifies an important Course teaching without getting caught up in Course language, doing it instead in straightforward everyday language. And while the basis of the authors' story is their making this journey together, they also pay at least some attention to what seems to be the more frequent situation, that one of the two in a relationship is working on a Course journey without any apparent participation or interest from the other party. At which point we may remember with Gary Renard that the only good relationship is a forgiven relationship, for it is only forgiveness which returns us home, and helps us to truly live the Holy Relationship in all our relationships. Cooperation from significant others is not required, simply because in essence we are forgiving ourselves in the end, through learning, with the Holy Spirit (or the Universal Inspiration, as the authors call it), to see ourself (but truly) in the partners in our special relationship.
Having thoroughly explained why our special relationships are our best classroom (because they mirror us), the bulk of the book could be read as a commentary to the Course's section on the Development of Trust, from the Course's Manual for Teachers, again presented in straightforward language, without making it per se necessary to consult the Course. This remains quite a feat! Undoubtedly this section (Chapters 5 and 6) are the high point of the book, and if I were to describe the book to a Course student, I'd call it a commentary to the Development of Trust. To a more general audience I might represent it as a guide for undertaking a journey of spiritual growth in the context of our most important relationships.
These chapters are extraordinary, for most people, myself included have quite a challenge with that particular section of the Course, and here it is, all in very clear, unambiguous language. The book correctly warns us that we don't always go through these stages in an orderly fashion, but sometimes may find ourselves switching back to an earlier stage, which is probably the main reason why people have such difficulty comprehending this section, because it seems we can never figure out where we are in the process. This is a bit like a long dive, when you come up you can see how far you made it, but while you are under water, you just keep on going as long as you can. Most of us have a terrible tendency to go scuba diving instead of swimming across, and as a result we work though the stages of the development of trust in a disorderly fashion, although we will gain clarity about it as we go along. The explanations here are crystal clear, including a diagram on the misalignment of our needs and wants through this process, which I'm sure will shed a lot of light for many readers.
The book has an occasional flourish of New Age veneer, particularly in some reflections on where we are in our evolution, as if this time were better than any other time for waking up. It seems to me it is the other way around, since we will choose whatever circumstances are most conducive to our growth, so of course this time is better for waking up than any other, if that's what we chose, and that's why we chose it. Within the illusion of time and space there may be a point, just as much as with Helen's "celestial speedup," and Pursah's comment to Gary Renard that it is more rewarding to be a Course student now than it was to be a disciple of Jesus two thousand years ago. Other examples are a quote on page 119, that little children and animals
would somehow be similar to enlightened people, and that flies in the face of the Course notion that everyone comes into this world with a fully formed ego. Jesus however does use the "become like little children" sometimes in the sense of letting go of our self-importance and judgments, and instead ask for help in order to enter the Kingdom - so in that respect the image has validity.
I do believe we should understand what the authors call a Unified Relationship as a special case in the curriculum of the Holy Relationship. For the Holy Relationship does not require two people, but only one, who can be "the saner of the two" in terms of the Course, to realize the Holy Relationship. There are no guarantees that our significant others in this particular time will come along at the same tempo in form, nor should students be dependent on that in any way, but evidently it can be very powerful if we can experience it in such a context, as the authors share with us from their own life in this book. However logically, once we accept the Atonement for ourselves, all our relationships would become a reflection of the Holy Relationship, though the experience in form may be odd and out of sync at times - the standard example being that no one would argue the crucifixion to be a peaceful experience.
In conclusion, I could only say that this book is a truly inspired work, and an inspiring read. In the process of reading it twice this year, I experienced that first hand, through a lot of integration that happened in the process of reading it. The material from the Course and other sources is so well integrated, and the paraphrasing of the Course's sometimes arcane usage is so crystal clear, that I really do believe a general reader could successfully read this book, without any need to consult the Course, which is high praise indeed. Having said that, I could not imagine why any reader who did not know the Course before, would fail to become interested in the process of reading this book. My point rather is that Take Me To Truth reflects such maturity and integration, that this in and of itself is perhaps the best advertising that the Course actually means what it says, given that Jesus in the Course clearly states that his goal as a teacher is to make himself superfluous, while the ego's teachers always teach at their pupil's expense, as they need to build themselves up, and thus they strive for dependence instead of true independence. Jesus in the Course strives for equality, and this book demonstrates that he means it, and that it works as advertised. To his disciples individually he explained everything. Still does, evidently.
Copyright, © 2007 Rogier F. van Vlissingen. All rights reserved.
But without parable spake he not unto them: and when they were alone, he expounded all things to his disciples. (Mk. 4:34 KJV)
So here it is in the modern words of the Scholars Version, as well as in the traditional wording of the King James Version, take your pick. A Course in Miracles famously says in its Preface: "Its only purpose is to provide a way in which some people will be able to find their own Internal Teacher." (ACIM:Preface p. viii). The point is this that following Jesus means to develop our own relationship with that Internal Teacher, and thus learning the Course is not about reading the book, nor about workshops, seminars and study groups, but about doing our own daily work with the Course, in which the words finally come to life whenever we truly ask for help from Jesus or the Holy Spirit to see things Their way, not ours, or as the Course also puts it: "Instead, there is a wish to understand all things created as they really are. And it is recognized that all things must be first forgiven, and then understood." (ACIM:T-30.V.1:5-6) It is through forgiveness that Jesus truly teaches us his way of looking at them, for it is a requirement of the forgiveness process that we should give up our judgment of the situation, before we are available to hear the Holy Spirit's take on things, and only in that process does Jesus explain everything to his disciples (Course students), he did then and he does now. Of necessity this is how the process must work, since the only purpose of the ego's judgment is to keep Jesus outside, with all the doors and windows shuttered, in line with what the Course also says : "The world was made as an attack on God." (ACIM:W-pII.3.2:1)
Nouk Sanchez and Tomas Vieira in their new book Take Me To Truth/Undoing the Ego share with us from their experience as they went their own (tandem) path of spiritual growth with A Course In Miracles by living it and applying it in their daily lives, and sharing the experience with each other and other people around them. This book is many things. It is a powerful introduction to the Course in very non-religious terms, which may be helpful to some aspiring students. The book is also a comment on the practice of the Course's Development of Trust section (in the Manual for Teachers, Chapter 4, M-4.A3-8) , and in the process it provides clarification on the Course's teaching of the Holy Relationship. Both of these last two are very inspiring aspects of the Course's teachings, as much as they befuddle many readers, and the guidance provided in this book gives us an answer for living and learning by providing some very powerful hand holding to readers who may find themselves struggling with the same issues.
To paraphrase the Markan quotation above in simplest possible terms, to those outside (i.e. identified with the ego, living in duality) it all comes in parables (of necessity, since in duality all is parable, which we can read either with the ego or with the Holy Spirit). But to his disciples individually he explains everything, i.e. when we go inside, and enter into a relationship with Jesus or the Holy Spirit, clarity comes because we can now see those parables with the Holy Spirit, in the light of Reason - at that point they are first forgiven and then understood. It all comes down to letting go of projection, and climbing into the observer seat with J. Talking about it in Course study groups or workshops is not enough, practicing it is what matters.
The book Take Me To Truth was born from living the Course, and it is an open invitation to the reader to do the same. The first most notable aspect of this book is that it is simply a good introduction to the Course, or perhaps I should call it an "on-ramp" to the Course, for it manages to introduce Course concepts effectively without any of the religious language in the Course. Since the seeming Christian terminology of the Course can be hard to take for some, this may prove very helpful, though I do believe that while the Course is not everyone's path, if it is your path, getting clarity about your relationship with Jesus and/or the Holy Spirit is most likely part of that process, for a lot of cultural stereotypes, including the "bitter idol" we made of Jesus in Christianity is undone exactly through sorting out our initial tendency to misunderstand the terminology, which only appears to be Christian. This aspect would be my reason for calling the book more an on-ramp to the Course than an introduction in the narrow sense, but having said that, the authors accomplished something truly remarkable, without any real compromise to anything the Course teaches. Their approach ensures that this book is not a "Course book," in the narrow sense, for it ranges more widely than the Course, though the thought model of the Course is definitely its foundation. In short, people may read this book simply because it's good, and it may happen to introduce them to the Course in a novel way, if they weren't Course students already, but it's not a necessity.
The book effortlessly incorporates the notion of Byron Katie's "The Work," which indeed is a very solid and also non-Christian sounding approach to the Course's notion of thought reversal, of truly changing our mind through forgiveness. It is an elegant and simple process, which simply shunts the entire train of our thoughts on to a different track altogether. "The Work" is an utterly practical implementation of the Course's forgiveness process. The book leverages other ideas as well, in particular also the Enneagram as a personality inventory, which can be helpful in becoming more aware of one's patterns in this particular life we think we are leading just now, and becoming more conscious of the games we (tend to) play is a very important step in any process of spiritual growth. I have tried the Enneagram, specifically by taking the on-line test which the book recommends (RHETI 2.5), and it is interesting though personally I perhaps relate more easily to astrology, but for many people the Enneagram may be more readily accessible. I personally ended up getting an ambiguous result among several categories, the main benefit of which is that I get to retake the test for free all the time, which adds up to quite a bit of savings, at $10 each.
Next the book explores the dynamics of special relationships and the reasons why our special relationships can be the most powerful classroom for undoing the ego, since evidently all our own issues are comprised in them. Once again it clarifies an important Course teaching without getting caught up in Course language, doing it instead in straightforward everyday language. And while the basis of the authors' story is their making this journey together, they also pay at least some attention to what seems to be the more frequent situation, that one of the two in a relationship is working on a Course journey without any apparent participation or interest from the other party. At which point we may remember with Gary Renard that the only good relationship is a forgiven relationship, for it is only forgiveness which returns us home, and helps us to truly live the Holy Relationship in all our relationships. Cooperation from significant others is not required, simply because in essence we are forgiving ourselves in the end, through learning, with the Holy Spirit (or the Universal Inspiration, as the authors call it), to see ourself (but truly) in the partners in our special relationship.
Having thoroughly explained why our special relationships are our best classroom (because they mirror us), the bulk of the book could be read as a commentary to the Course's section on the Development of Trust, from the Course's Manual for Teachers, again presented in straightforward language, without making it per se necessary to consult the Course. This remains quite a feat! Undoubtedly this section (Chapters 5 and 6) are the high point of the book, and if I were to describe the book to a Course student, I'd call it a commentary to the Development of Trust. To a more general audience I might represent it as a guide for undertaking a journey of spiritual growth in the context of our most important relationships.
These chapters are extraordinary, for most people, myself included have quite a challenge with that particular section of the Course, and here it is, all in very clear, unambiguous language. The book correctly warns us that we don't always go through these stages in an orderly fashion, but sometimes may find ourselves switching back to an earlier stage, which is probably the main reason why people have such difficulty comprehending this section, because it seems we can never figure out where we are in the process. This is a bit like a long dive, when you come up you can see how far you made it, but while you are under water, you just keep on going as long as you can. Most of us have a terrible tendency to go scuba diving instead of swimming across, and as a result we work though the stages of the development of trust in a disorderly fashion, although we will gain clarity about it as we go along. The explanations here are crystal clear, including a diagram on the misalignment of our needs and wants through this process, which I'm sure will shed a lot of light for many readers.
The book has an occasional flourish of New Age veneer, particularly in some reflections on where we are in our evolution, as if this time were better than any other time for waking up. It seems to me it is the other way around, since we will choose whatever circumstances are most conducive to our growth, so of course this time is better for waking up than any other, if that's what we chose, and that's why we chose it. Within the illusion of time and space there may be a point, just as much as with Helen's "celestial speedup," and Pursah's comment to Gary Renard that it is more rewarding to be a Course student now than it was to be a disciple of Jesus two thousand years ago. Other examples are a quote on page 119, that little children and animals
would somehow be similar to enlightened people, and that flies in the face of the Course notion that everyone comes into this world with a fully formed ego. Jesus however does use the "become like little children" sometimes in the sense of letting go of our self-importance and judgments, and instead ask for help in order to enter the Kingdom - so in that respect the image has validity.
I do believe we should understand what the authors call a Unified Relationship as a special case in the curriculum of the Holy Relationship. For the Holy Relationship does not require two people, but only one, who can be "the saner of the two" in terms of the Course, to realize the Holy Relationship. There are no guarantees that our significant others in this particular time will come along at the same tempo in form, nor should students be dependent on that in any way, but evidently it can be very powerful if we can experience it in such a context, as the authors share with us from their own life in this book. However logically, once we accept the Atonement for ourselves, all our relationships would become a reflection of the Holy Relationship, though the experience in form may be odd and out of sync at times - the standard example being that no one would argue the crucifixion to be a peaceful experience.
In conclusion, I could only say that this book is a truly inspired work, and an inspiring read. In the process of reading it twice this year, I experienced that first hand, through a lot of integration that happened in the process of reading it. The material from the Course and other sources is so well integrated, and the paraphrasing of the Course's sometimes arcane usage is so crystal clear, that I really do believe a general reader could successfully read this book, without any need to consult the Course, which is high praise indeed. Having said that, I could not imagine why any reader who did not know the Course before, would fail to become interested in the process of reading this book. My point rather is that Take Me To Truth reflects such maturity and integration, that this in and of itself is perhaps the best advertising that the Course actually means what it says, given that Jesus in the Course clearly states that his goal as a teacher is to make himself superfluous, while the ego's teachers always teach at their pupil's expense, as they need to build themselves up, and thus they strive for dependence instead of true independence. Jesus in the Course strives for equality, and this book demonstrates that he means it, and that it works as advertised. To his disciples individually he explained everything. Still does, evidently.
Copyright, © 2007 Rogier F. van Vlissingen. All rights reserved.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)