The Song that Sings

 Content and Form In A Course in Miracles

By Joseph Shore

Understanding Form and Content in General

The error of confusing Form and Content is widespread today and exists in multiple disciplines. When one builds a house, there is the form of concrete, glass, wood and stone. That is your house’s form. What it means to you (content) is what you do there. Your experiences within that form give it meaning. Soon you find yourself saying, “Let’s go back to the ‘house’” as often as you say, “Let’s go back ‘home.’”   You have given the form a meaning and now see them together as one. This is a common mistake. If you have to move into a new “form,” you will have a lot of difficulty because you may think that you have left all “meaning” (content) over at your previous house.

Now if you are an architect you may think you see abstract meaning in forms, but that is only because you have been working in the mind with form and meaning and now see the two as one, which they are not.

Form and Content in Music

Let’s take music. We’ll look at a great work of art, Verdi’s La Traviata. It has a form; not wood this time, as in the house, but musical forms. The notes are like the formal blueprints of the musical forms. They are nothing in themselves. The real musical forms are in the mind of Verdi. His creation entails both form and content. Knowing Verdi I would say that the content came to him first and then the form. Performers need to know the mind of Verdi before they can perform his works. What is the meaning (the content) of La Traviata? The story itself is not the meaning. This is a principle that you need to remember. The story is another part of the form. The lesson of the story, whether conceived of as didactic, moral, or psychological, is not the meaning. There are private meanings in terms of people’s emotions when they seeTraviata, but these private meanings are not THE meaning.  The form (the operatic composition)is very complex and  it may be able to lead you from its form to its meaning.  One can close the eyes and listen to a Mozart Concerto and be astonished with the abstract meaning hiding within the form. Form and content are still distinct, but content is hiding in the form. This is equally true if you are listening to Don Giovanni, but you will miss the fuller meaning if you don’t observe the story. Here’s an important clue. The real meaning of great art always makes you look higher than the form or the story (which is a literary form), and it is always a simple meaning. It would not take many words to write it, and the words would then be just forms and not true.  The real meaning is higher than the story and higher than our ordinary waking consciousness. The real meaning sends your consciousness on a journey in mind. We won’t describe that journey yet. My point is to illustrate what is “form” and what is “meaning” (or content). Obviously these words I am typing are “form” and the meaning is inside my mind. If I am skillful enough in using form I may be able to transfer meaning to your mind. Artistic form can lead you to its meaning. Another characteristic of the real meaning of great art is that it always strikes us as “inspired.” All great art is inspired. Who can listen to La Traviata and think it not so. Who could hear Handel, Vivaldi, Chopin, and Puccini and not be touched with inspiration? The art carries you into its higher meaning. All great art is inspired. We wonder how the composers could create such works. 

The method of inspiration is never disclosed in truth.  It takes place within the mind of the composer and we are left in wonder. There is never a way to rank inspiration. You do not have this kind of access to inspiration to judge it.

Schubert’s song, “An die Musik” is expressing something wonderful, touching, real…What is it?

http://youtu.be/rusv0pP_qqw

O, wond'rous art, --- in countless gray and darkened hours,

When life's most bitter taste - of loneliness was mine --

Have you transported my heart -To warm and happy meadows,

And so, you've offered me joy - and fierce endurance,

Your magic beauty, --- your love, and peace .

Sometimes your harp - pours forth a sigh of passion,

So sweet a blessed chord --- in melodies of old,

Then heaven's doors --- with hours of love does open.

Oh, gracious art, for these I thank you so!

Oh, gracious music, I thank you so!

The music and the words are the form. The words express a story of one singer, and now it is up to you to hear the meaning with the clues I have just given to you. In this song, the musical form is totally simple.  You must listen to the story to hear the song and you will find the meaning in your mind if you follow the song well into your ear, brain, and mind. Remember, the meaning will come to you in a consciousness higher than your normal waking state. It will come to you in stillness and it will be simple and profound. Our journey to meaning is a motion towards simplicity.

I think I can illustrate that with a lyric poem that I wrote entitled “The Song that Sings.”

The Song that seems to be forgotten is not.

Its melody stays there, firm, beautiful,

structured as it was.

What could you do to change it?

And so it haunts you, coming back in little wisps

of memory, phrase by phrase, asking for its whole.

And you would remember.

Remember, and let a little of the Song

come back to you and through you.

In eternity where all is One,

A song was singing,

Unaware of itself as a song,

 but aware of its content of love.

Being, Awareness, Bliss sang in the song.

The song filled all that was or ever could be.

There was no place the song was not,

Nor was there any place which did not welcome it.

There was no place.

There was only the Song.

A note of the song heard itself

and thought of a descant to the melody

The descant became aware of itself

and wanted to listen to the Song.

The descant experienced the love in the Song it heard.

It filled itself with desire to hear.

More notes of the Song joined the descant as observers

And heard harmony to the Song.

Soon the Song was sung in harmony with many voices.

The descant said,

“Let us make form so that the Song can be remembered.”

Until this time there had been no difficulty in remembering the Song.

But other notes joined in the descant’s fear that the Song might be forgotten.

And fear began to remember the Song differently.

Soon the Song became embroidered with quick tempo changes, harmonic shifts,

Key changes, with such quantum rapidity that an ear was formed,

Then a brain, a mouth, a larynx, a body

And the Song forgot itself

But it could now hear.

It employed the body to search for the Song.

But no search satisfied it.

Soon the body forgot its purpose.

The Song which was fabric of its bones

Lay at rest in its tissues.

Having no purpose, the body began to think.

The Song which was only Love lay buried,

And the body thought of fear.

Fearful bodies created other fearful bodies

Each with a tiny memory of the Song

As a hologram within each cell.

There came a day when one body listened closely.

It heard first a tiny wisp of the Song,

Then a phrase, and then the whole Song.

It felt the Song in its bones and muscles,

Its brain and tissues,

And knew that it was the Song.

It told other bodies.

One by One they listened deep within and heard.

But the Song was complicated now,

Full of rapid key changes, tempo shifts, orchestral embroideries

The Song moved at quantum speed.

Bodies could not slow it down.

So they began to sing their own songs,

Some fearful but others prescient.

Great singers came into bodies and sang great songs.

Bodies began to remember more of the One Song.

It happened one day very quickly as a singer sang his song.

He listened deeply as he sang and observed his song closely.

He listened to his breath. He observed the tone until he saw his sound.

As his sound progressed he followed it,

First to his ear,

Then to his brain,

Then to his world.

He followed his sound to no place,

And there the One Song was singing,

Not complicated, not embroidered.

The slow, smooth melody began to unwind the fabric of his bones,

The sinews of his body,

For they were made of nothing but the melody made complicated.

As the body unwound there was no fear.

The slow, smooth Song spoke only of a Love that could not be different.

As complicated key and tempo changes resolved into the One Song,

Notes that had been trapped in the body rejoined the melody.

Note by note they flew from the body back into the Song.

As the last note approached the Song,

It tarried just a little as an observer.

Do I need to observe? It asked itself.

And as soon as it asked the question

It chose to rejoin the Song.

Singers, listen deep within,

And hear the Song that makes you sing.

Follow it and let it change you.

The Song that seems to be forgotten is not.

Its melody stays there, firm, beautiful,

structured as it was.

What could you do to change it?

And so it haunts you, coming back in little wisps

of memory, phrase by phrase, asking for its whole.

And you would remember.

Remember, and let the whole Song

Find itself in you.

In quiet eternity does the One Song sing,

Unaware of itself as a Song, singing only Love,

The meaning of the poem is not in the words or the meter (form). The form is beautiful and as a work of art, it asks something of you. All art is confrontational. It asks you to step out of ordinary waking conscious and follow it in mind to the meaning.  I have said that several times now and it is time I clarified what that means. It means that you have to allow the art to bring your mind to stillness. There you will find the meaning. If I were to try to put the meaning of my poem into a few words I might say the meaning is: “We are all part of one source which is Love and we forget who we are. But we will remember and find that we have never left our source.”  But if you believe those words you didn’t get the meaning. The true meaning would sing to you. The meaning is a personal experience. When you “know” something it has an inherent validation. You don’t need to believe the words and the words you might use to try to explain the experience cannot contain the truth

A beautiful example of form and content is in my favorite movie, A River Runs Through It. It tells a wonderful story and has stories within stories, but it tells you the meaning at the end:

“Like many fly fishermen in western Montana where the summer days are almost Arctic in length, I often do not start fishing until the cool of the evening. Then in the Arctic half-light of the canyon, all existence fades to a being with my soul and memories and the sounds of the Big Blackfoot River and a four-count rhythm and the hope that a fish will rise. Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world's great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of those rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs. I am haunted by waters”

The meaning is not these words, as beautiful as they are. You would have to find this meaning within yourself as the protagonist did. Art can, however, point you upwards and the form can lead you to the meaning. That meaning would be yours.

We have been looking at form and content in art. Now let’s look at the Bible! “Whoa, that’s holy stuff”, you say. “You can’t talk about the Holy Bible this way.”

Form and Content in the Bible

Well yes we can. I spent my academic life as a theologian and I studied the Bible intensely. The Bible cannot be seen, though, as one story. The Bible means “the books.” The Bible is a collection of books. Each book contains many stories within it. In looking at the form and content of one book, we look at the stories. Where did they come from? What are they trying to teach? This observation of the stories we call “form history” (or in German “formgeschichte”).  The words in the Bible are the most obvious forms and by themselves they teach nothing, but put into the form of stories they attempt to lead the reader to a point of view which the Biblical writers considered important.

I think I can give you one example that will make all this clear. Among people who think the words of the Bible are infallibly true there is no more contested story than the virgin birth of Jesus.  There are huge problems with accepting the virgin birth story as literally true. First the story appears in only Matthew and Luke. Mark, who was the first writer, doesn’t consider Jesus’ birth important enough to talk about. John’s Gospel (the latest) has developed new stories about Jesus as the incarnate Son of God but no mention is given of a virgin birth, although it would have fit nicely into his quasi-Gnostic Gospel. Paul made no mention of the virgin birth and spoke of Jesus as simply “born of woman.” The problems are resolved when we look at the stories from the science of both form criticism and redaction criticism. Remember, the story is not true. It is a part of the form, a literary form.

When the Dead Sea Scrolls were found there were many non-canonical books found there as well which tell us a great deal about Judaism in the period, 100BCE to 100CE. The stories in these books are much earlier than the Christian Gospels.  Hugh Schonfield, a Biblical historian and archeologist, made reference to these stories. I will quote from his account:

“In the Genesis Apocraphon found among the Dead Sea Scrolls, the lost opening apparently told of the miraculous birth of Noah, and the text begins with the suspicion of his father, Lamech that his wife had been made pregnant by an angel and therefore had been unfaithful to him. She repudiates this. (See Vermes, The Dead Sea Scrolls in English).

“Of Abraham it was told that when he was born a star appeared in the east and moved across the heavens. The wise men went to King Nimrod and informed him that this meant the birth of a child destined to be great. Terror seized the King and he sent for his councilors, who advised him to kill the son of Terah. The king sent his soldiers to slay the child, but God protected him by dispatching the angel Gabriel to conceal him by clouds and mists. Afterwards Terah, fearing for the boy’s life, fled secretly from the country. (See book of Jashar and Maase Abraham.)

“Concerning the birth of Moses the legends tell us that Pharaoh decreed the death of the Israelite male children because of a dream the magicians interpreted to mean that by an Israelite child Egypt would be destroyed. Amram, whose wife was pregnant, was alarmed by the decree; but God spoke to him in a dream and told him that the child to be born would be the one whom the Egyptians dreaded. (See Targum of Palestine and Josephus Antiq II ix. 3-4)” (quoted from Hugh J Schonfield, The Passover Plot, pp.56-57)

In light of these stories  it seems obvious that the accounts in Matthew and Luke regarding the virgin birth and the events of Jesus’ birth were a story within a story, a literary form, designed to lead the reader past form to the conclusion that Jesus was the culmination of all the past Jewish heroes of faith. The story of the virgin birth was never intended to be interpreted literally. Those who do so, believe in the form and miss the message. One is free to question Matthew and Luke concerning their conclusion that Jesus was the apex of all past Jewish heroes of faith, but there is no questioning that this was their intention in the story.

Stories of this type were also common elsewhere. “In the case of Apollonius, the famous sage who flourished in the second half of the first century A.D. it was related that the god Proteus appeared to his mother before his birth. She was not afraid, but asked him what sort of child she would bear. ‘Myself,’ he replied.’” (See Philostratus, Life of Apolonius of Tyana, Ibid, page 57).”

I realize that this approach to the Bible will seem irreverent and hurtful to those who love the Bible. I hope you can forgive me. If this seems like a sin to you, I hope you can set it aside. Just look past it, for in truth I have not started this dialogue to destroy the Bible.

When a story has a particular intention to explain deeper matters like creation itself, or the condition of man, we call them “myths.”  By “myth” we do not mean a false tale, but rather an attempt to look at matters of great depth in an artistic way. That is, the myth is there to say, “The truth is sort of like this but not literally.”All religions are good at myth making but wisdom councils their adherents not to believe in the myths literally but to explore their deeper quest for meaning. Unfortunately, this council most often goes unheeded and myths are turned into beliefs which create dissension.  It is clear now that whoever the historical Jesus was, his disciples did not comprehend him or his message. Some of the statements attributed to Jesus have the ring of truth, but the New Testament as a whole is a theological interpretation. The Gospels are like a long “commercial” for the incipient faith. By the time of the second century A.D. Christianity had splintered into many sects. By the fourth century Christianity was still struggling against its rival religion, Mithraism. The “contribution” of Constantine was that he blended the two religions into one in order to keep peace within the Roman Empire. Myths became literal truth and belief in them was enforced by law. From that time until Martin Luther, early “Christianity” was lost. I do not mean that Luther was able to restore original Christianity but he set in motion a quest to find what had been lost. That quest found its expression in multiple forms of Protestantism. One can see Albert Schweitzer as an expression of that quest in his remarkable book The Quest of the Historical Jesus A Critical Study of its Progress from Reimarus to Wrede By Albert Schweitzer D. THEOL., D. PHIL., D. MED (published English 1910) Unfortunately Schweitzer could not find him and the quest passed to Bultmann and his students, then to the Jesus Seminar. Although they failed miserably to shed light on the luminosity known as Jesus who appeared in the first century A.D., they at least gave us an informed opinion regarding which sayings of Jesus are genuine. Essentially they brought to their project a preconceived idea of a secular Jesus which they wanted to find and they found him.  Still, the sayings of Jesus leap off of the page with meaning. The parables he used were not that dissimilar to the Buddha’s parables.  Albert Einstein, said, "I am a Jew but I am enthralled by the luminous figure of the Nazarene...No one can read the Gospels without feeling the actual presence of Jesus. His personality pulsates in every word. No myth is filled with such life."

The most influential theologian of the twentieth century was Paul Tillich. Tillich united philosophy and theology into one. This was quite remarkable since they had previously been enemies. Tillich was the first Christian theologian to offer an Eastern view of God. Until this time, Christianity had been the religion of Constantine which saw God as an emperor. He was viewed as a being, with personality. This is called monarchical monotheism and it had its earlier roots in Judaic conceptions of Yahweh. This being also appeared to have multiple personality disorder because he was three in one and talked in the royal plural.

Tillich boldly proclaimed that God did not exist. God was existence itself. God was not a particular, personal being or he would be just a being alongside others; perhaps the most powerful being but still a being alongside others. Tillich, drawing from the deep well of the East, referred to God as the ground of all being, or being itself’

In addition to Tillich’s definition of God as Being itself, inspired as it is from the East, we would have to add two more characteristics. God is not only Being, but also Awareness and Bliss. God is sat, cit ananda., the energetic state of non-duality.

Tillich offered the West a revolution against the monarchical monotheism of the past; the literal Yahweh or Jehovah, or the Constantinian Imperial god.  In so doing he defied the West’s most cherished theology of St. Anselm, Thomas Aquinas, Duns Scotus, and William of Ockham. He truly opened the eyes of the West towards the East which for three thousand years had understood God abstractly. As you can imagine, fundamentalists of all persuasions were quick to attack Tillich. He had messed with their most cherished literal beliefs.

Two of Tillich’s most important books The Courage to Be and Dynamics of Faith were published in 1952, just at the same time other writers were bringing the wisdom of the East into America. This migration of Eastern thought to the West has been well documented and need not be rehearsed here.

Perhaps the most important of the writers involved in this education of the West was Alan Watts. Watts had begun as an Anglican priest with an ear for the East. At first he tried to find a happy syncretism of the Eastern wisdom with Anglicanism. But happy it was not and soon “Father” Watts left the church to become his own man. In a vast panoply of books, tracts, and lectures, he became the most skillful popularizer of Eastern wisdom for the West. He was not a lightweight thinker but he disliked formal theology and philosophy and preferred to find his own course. He was not a “joiner” but a commenting observer. His books are brief and have more of the nature of Zen koans than of belief systems. Deeply suspicious of all formal religions, he did not want anyone to “believe” his books. He wrote in a way to “scratch the inner itch to know.” He wrote to reveal truth rather than hide it in complex forms. His forms are those of witticisms, Zen koans, and story-telling, all designed for the reader to be able to get the point. “Substance” found it hard to hide itself in Alan Watts’ form.  He could not have conceived of any “student” re-reading his books hundreds of times in search of deeper meanings. He would have been amazed at such stupidity. He often said that every mass should end with a solemn burning of the Bible, because you should have gotten the message already and when you get the message you hang up the phone! You don’t build a shrine around it!

In 1964 he wrote an extraordinary book called Beyond Theology – The Art of Godmanship. In it he used a new hermeneutic to offer a fresh analysis of Christianity. He used a hermeneutic he called “The Chinese box.” The term is taken from the construction of boxes within boxes. As a hermeneutic this meant that Watts was going to look at Christianity from the perspective of the East, purely as an artistic and enlightening endeavor.  In a relatively short work he made clear the fallacies of monarchical monotheism, the problem of seeing oneself as an ego, and the solutions the East offered. Christianity was reinterpreted in light of Taoism, Hinduism, Buddhism and Zen. The result was an explosion of meaning in the minds of the Western readers. Christians, especially fundamentalists, were outraged that anyone would try to “explain them.” Persecution they could stand. What they could not stand was that they should be explained! They viewed it as sacrilege that anyone would treat the Holy Bible in such a way, and they certainly would not burn their Bibles after mass as Watts suggested. They would cherish them, love them, hold them to their breasts, re-read them all their lives and believe every word.  Among lower Protestants the theory of plenary verbal inspiration of the Bible became the hot belief. That theory says that every word in the Bible is literally and infallibly true and is to be believed. If you want to know about Geology, you look in the Bible. If you want to know about Paleontology, you look in the Bible. “All of those scientists were just wrong and it was up to Christians to stand against them.” If you think I am misrepresenting these people, I sat in many lectures where Geology and Paleontology were “explained” by a literal belief in Noah’s flood.  They had no understanding of Form and Content. The long form of the Bible had seduced them to believe that form was the content. Within this environment, Preachers Bible thumped on TV and attacked anything or anyone who disagreed with them. 

While Christianity was in attack mode the world was in the middle of the 1960’s and minds were opening everywhere. The East had come to America and had joined itself with the counter-culture movement. In addition to Watts, Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert, Harvard scientists, had taken LSD and thought it offered a chemical correlative to Enlightenment!  Both left Harvard, Leary to explore consciousness his way and Alpert to go to India to study with Hindu Guru Neem Karoli Baba. There he became a devout student of Hinduism and was renamed Ram Dass (which means ‘Servant of God’) by his beloved teacher. He came back to America a truly changed man. He had found his enlightenment. Leary, in spite of all of the good things he did, did not find his. There were now powerful voices within the Western world which spoke for the wisdom of the East. Ram Dass’ book Be Here Now, awakened every reader at least a little. It was like an explosion of truth that had been building up in the decades of the 50’s and 60’s.

Meanwhile in New York City an interesting thing was happening. Dr. Helen Schucman was a research psychologist at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital which was a part of Columbia University’s School of Medicine. She had only one other colleague in her department, Dr. William Thetford who had hired Helen.  Helen had a troubled childhood and developmental years. Helen’s parents were half Jewish but neither practiced their faith. Helen’s mother seems to have resented her Jewish faith and experimented with other spiritual paths. Her father was not interested in religion at all. Helen seemed continually to recall an experience that happened to her in toddlerhood which became a symbol through her life of anxiety. She asked her father to teach her Judaism but he was not interested. For a while Helen identified herself as a Jew. Her parents left her care in the hands of a Nanny who was a Catholic and Helen went with her to mass. She was fascinated with the mass and its forms. She later visited Lourdes and was tremendously impacted. At various times she experimented with Christian Science and with Baptist Protestantism. Her family’s maid was a Baptist who read the Bible to Helen frequently. At her maid’s encouragement, Helen was baptized when she was 13 years old. However, after her baptism she soon stopped going to church, saying “It was no use. I do not have faith.” She became an agnostic and then an angry atheist.  She completed her PhD in psychology in 1957 from New York University and the following year was hired by Dr. William Thetford to join him in the department of medical psychology at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital.  They worked together for seven years in an environment that Helen called “oppressive.” Her relationship with Bill was clouded with all sorts of personality clashes and personal agendas. Finally, in June 1965 Bill gave a little lecture to Helen that “there must be a better way to work together than this and I am determined to find it.” Instead of attacking, Helen said, “You’re right Bill. We’ll find it together.”

In June of 1965 Helen began to have psychic experiences and lucid dreams. She reported these all to Bill. In one dream she was in a boat floating down a canal. There was a hook in the boat and she reached into the water with it and snagged a big chest. On the chest was the word “Aesculapius” (which was the name of the Greek god of healing). She entered a big cave and opened the chest. Inside was a big parchment scroll which she unrolled. In the middle were the words “God Is.”

This psychic period ended as abruptly as it began. Then later in 1965 Helen began to hear an “inner voice.” She told this to Bill who encouraged her to write down whatever the voice said and they would look at it together. Helen was very ambivalent about this process. She prided herself on being a scientist, not someone who heard inner voices. She was conservative in psychological theory, by her own words, and a Freudian. Eventually she gave in and wrote down the text as she heard it. The voice kept saying, “This is a course in miracles. Please take notes.” Helen, after all, was a teacher in a school of medicine.  From 1965-1972 she took down the whole dictation. The text from October 21, 1965 - October 10, 1968; the workbook for students: May 26,1969 - February 18,1971; the  manual for teachers, April 12,1972 - September 7¹, 1972  Later a  Preface was written and A Clarification of Terms.

       Form and Content in A Course in Miracles

All in all about 1500 pages encompass A Course in Miracles. The text is one of the most beautiful pieces of art ever to be created in the Western World. Just remember that as we go into analysis. The Course is written as a kind of psychoanalysis in poetry.

The inner voice who dictated the Course identified himself as the Jesus who had lived in the New Testament. He refers to his disciples then and explains how they misunderstood him. He talks about his crucifixion and what it really should mean. There is no doubt that Helen heard a voice which she identified with the historical Jesus. It was not “some other Jesus.”  In 1965 this event was considered “channeling” and at first many people really believed that the resurrected Jesus in His glorified body, who sits in heaven next to His Father, had descended to earth once again to whisper in Helen Schucman’s ear all 1500 pages of his new Course that would correct the errors of the New Testament. Disaffected Christians who had left the church, new agers without a system, searching minds, all came to A Course in Miracles, believing that these were the words of Jesus. It took quite a while for some clarity to come. Dr. Kenneth Wapnick had met Helen and Bill in 1972 and had felt called to help edit the Course and prepare it for publication. Wapnick himself, another Freudian clinical psychologist, had also come from a troubled past. He had left his Judaism, become a clinical psychologist, worked in a psychiatric hospital in upstate New York, converted to Catholicism and was preparing to enter a monastery when he met Helen.  We can see now that all of these people involved in the Course had complex, if not troubled backgrounds, and were “seekers” in a time in the 1960’s when seeking was allowed.  Wapnick described the Course as a “non-dualistic thought system “and often remarked, “ We intellectuals need a thought system too.”  In forums he distinguished the Course from Christianity and set it apart. If Jesus really wrote ACIM, then Wapnick was the correlative to Paul the Apostle in the New Testament.  Thank God that was not the case. Wapnick explained that the mind of Helen Schucman heard the message of Love, which she indentified with Jesus, while her mind created literary forms in which to express that love. Helen’s mind made the form and the content was universal Love. Helen experienced it as dictation but it was not literally from the mouth of Jesus.

Her method of writing is well known by spiritual adepts as “inspirational writing” or some might call it “journaling.”  The process is a little different for each person. Most people have to still the mind before they hear an inner voice. Then the words may be written down. I wrote an entire book this way, but once I got the message, I destroyed the manuscript. I did not want to publish it because people would begin to believe in it literally and I would have added yet one more belief system into the world. I would sooner pull my own teeth. This little book is a primer to help people understand the difference between form and content, especially in reading ACIM. 

Wapnick’s view did not universally prevail and soon there were all sorts of squabbling divisions among the students of the Course.  Some insisted on believing that Jesus literally wrote it and therefore new churches should be formed. Some wanted to put a copy of ACIM in every hotel along with the Bible! Teachers of one persuasion attacked other teachers of different persuasions. In the short time the Course has been in the world it has more than matched the splintered dissensions of Christianity in the first century AD! Wapnick admits this and adds, “It will only get worse.” And it has. To help distinguish between form and content Wapnick offers this clarity:

“And so, as I have said many times, the form of the Course is from Helen. Here are some illustrative examples of the formal qualities of A Course in Miracles that can be directly attributable to its scribe:

1) It is in the English language.

2) Its idiom is American. There is even a reference to the Declaration of Independence and American currency of “green paper strips.”

3) Helen philosophically was a Platonist. The philosophy of A Course in Miracles is Platonic, and there are even references to Plato’s famous Allegory of the Cave from the Republic. Moreover, the statement that “words are but symbols of symbols. . . .[and] are thus twice removed from reality” (M-21.1:9-10), is also directly taken from the Republic.

4) Helen loved Shakespeare. The Course is Shakespearean in its language. Much of it is written in blank verse (unrhymed poetry) and in iambic pentameter, the form of Shakespeare’s poetry. One can also find allusions to Hamlet, Helen’s favorite play.

5) Helen was enamored of the King James Version of the Bible. She did not like the content of the Bible at all, but loved the way it was written. Thus, in the Course one finds biblical “archaicisms”—the Elizabethan way of speaking.

6) Helen was fiercely logical. She had one of the most logical minds I have ever seen, and A Course in Miracles develops its thought system—the ego’s and the Holy Spirit’s—in a strictly logical manner. In addition, one finds that the syllogistic form of argument is both implicitly and explicitly used.

7) Helen was an educator. The Course’s curricular format is clear: text, workbook for students, manual for teachers; the Holy Spirit is our Teacher; and the language throughout reflects the learning aspects of the curriculum.

8) Helen was a psychologist. Her psychological background was Freudian and she had a great respect for Freud’s work. As I have been saying for over thirty years: without Freud, one would not have A Course in Miracles, as the presentation of the ego thought system is heavily based upon Freud’s remarkable insights, which were second nature to Helen. The material on Freud is heavily weighted in favor of Freud—Jung does not come off very well. Helen did not like Jung, and neither did Bill; they did not know much about him and his work, but they did not like him. And so, when one reads these comments about Freud and Jung, it becomes clear that distinct biases are involved.

9) Helen had a love-hate relationship with Jesus. Of course there is no hate in the Course in terms of Jesus, but no one can mistake his loving and non-judgmental presence throughout.

And so, we can see how the form of the Course is all Helen’s. Interestingly, however, the style of the writing was not Helen’s, who wrote in an almost Spartan style, appropriate for scientific writing, in contrast to the more poetic and (at times) grammatically loose sentence structure one finds in the Course, which used to, incidentally, drive Helen up a wall. The content of A Course in Miracles, however, is clearly not Helen’s, at least not the Helen the world knew or the person she consciously identified with. This explains why she felt at liberty to change the form, though never the content. Helen knew what the published Course ought to be.” ( from The History of the Manuscripts of A Course in Miracles by Kenneth Wapnick, Ph.D. used by permission)

One might think this would settle the matter but it has not.  Wapnick has done another service by condensing the whole 1500 pages into a story, like an epic myth. This story appears nowhere in the Course and has prompted literalists to decry the Wapnick story as tampering.   With Dr. Wapnick’s permission, here is his story: I will give you a short précis and you can read the whole long story for yourself at:

http://www.facim.org/excerpts/s3e1.htm the full story from Dr. Wapnick

Here is the précis:

In the Course's view of reality there is a world of Oneness, Heaven, Mind, God and His One Son, which is the sum of all His extensions of His Love. This is a world of Mind and total oneness. The myth of world creation says that there crept into the Son's Mind, the tiny mad idea that He could be different from His Father. Since this could not really happen, it was like a dream the Son fell into. But once he appeared to fall into it, he was an observer, and just as quickly two thoughts came to his mind. One thought, the Course calls the ‘ego,’ said "you have done something terrible. You have really hurt your Father. You should be ashamed, and furthermore, God is not going to let you get away with this. The wages of sin is death." The other thought that came to the separated mind of the son was "this never happened. Nothing was done. Wake up." This is the voice of the Holy Spirit, his memory of Truth. The Course calls the council of the ego, the “wrong mind,” and the council of the Holy Spirit, the “right mind.” But the son believed in the ego's version and experienced guilt. So the separated son now believing he is the ego, runs out of his mind and creates a universe to hide in by projecting the guilt he experiences on to this universe. As he enters this universe he splits into zillions and zillions of pieces, each a hologram of the whole mind, now associated with the ego. But as he projects himself into this illusory universe, he forgets what he has done and who he really is. He creates bodies as places to hide from God and protect his dreamy desire to be an individual, separated, distinct from his Father, and each of these bodies believes in the ego's lie that the son is now a sinner, guilty and afraid. So he is now in the world thinking he is a body, thinking his senses give him a true picture of reality. But he also carried with him into the dream a faint memory of who he really is. The ego is the wrong mind that he has chosen but the right mind of the Holy Spirit has been carried into the dream too, and it tells the son, "Forgive those who seem to hurt you in this world. Nothing has happened. It is just a dream." Little by little the separated hologram son begins to listen to his right mind (or not) and forgive. As he does he begins to remember that he is a mind and not a body. Since he is a hologram and carries the whole within him he can go back in the mind where the original mistake took place, the choosing of the ego's thought system, and he can choose again, this time for his right minded Holy Spirit. When all of the Sonship has returned to the Holy Spirit, God Himself will reach down and bring us back up to Him. But actually since the Son has been dreaming, it is more like He nudges the Son and says, "Wake up." Then we are back where we have never left, in a Heaven of Oneness with God and His One Son, the extension of all His Love.

Are you confused yet? You should be, for Dr. Wapnick’s story—if you read the complete one on line, is long and complex. He has taken the “forms” in Helen’s book and put them into stories (forms) of his own to weave one account. This is intended to help clarify the Course for students. He even makes a chart to refer to when telling the story. Again, used with permission, here is the chart:

I have observed ACIM students a long time now. In the early 1990’s I led a study group on the Course and talked to many students. I have watched videos of major teachers of the Course and observed the students. I just finished watching 12 DVDs of Dr. Wapnick’s workshop and I was as interested to see the student’s expressions and reactions as I was to hear Dr. Wapnick.  

It is my experience and observation that students are trying to “believe” the Course-Story literally. I have never seen such dumbfounded and agonized expressions on people’s faces as are found among ACIM students. They are trying to BELIEVE Wapnick’s story. The story is a FORM. Remember one of our rules in interpretation? The story is not literally true!!! You have to find the meaning in the story and that meaning will have to be personalized in you. THE STORY IS UNBELIEVABLE!!! Stop trying to believe it. Dr. Wapnick’s chart reminds me of one we used to use in Sunday School. Christianity has its chart as well. I won’t draw it for you but it is a three layered chart with Heaven at the top, earth in the middle and hell below. This was the chart of the first century. This was their world view. Bultmann showed us that we have to stop believing in that world view literally and find personal meaning. But all during Sunday School, the teacher had her black board and her three storied chart and would point to it for us to “learn” and “believe.”The thing about charts is that they are limiting.. When we asked her to show us on the chart where “ghosts” are, she couldn’t answer because there is no place on her chart for them. When we asked where psychics are, she couldn’t answer. There was no place on the chart. One knows then that the world view of the system is too narrow to serve reality. It serves only the closed system of thought. Any thought system religiously believed is a closed system. It goes round and round in a circle and is based on the principle of games. Rules to games begin with presuppositions and goals. When you play “monopoly” you are not allowed to use the rules of “checkers.” That is why the world’s wisdom literature of Taoism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Kaballah, Sufism is all interconnected in the primordial tradition, to avoid a closed system! Their dialogue and interpenetration of myths keeps the system open.

Dr. Wapnick’s story of the Course is never found in the Course. That is why it is opposed by the other main branch of Course interpretation, Robert Perry and the Circle of Atonement.  To them, every word in the Course is literally from Jesus and literally true unless the Course specifically states otherwise.

I have no problem with Wapnick’s story of the metaphysics of the Course, but the story contains within it other forms. The story unfolds itself through literary forms. I am going to look at these forms from the point of view of literary criticism. From that standpoint they are parables or forms, not literal truth. Many students are not seeing that. So here we go. We will use the same literary criticism that we used on the Bible! “Wait,” you say. “You can’t do that to the Course.” Where have we heard that voice before? I promise I will do it lovingly and we will end this little walk through the woods as “Not two.”.

Let us look at the parables in Wapnick’s story and see if we can move towards meaning. I promise I will use no charts!

The parable of Heaven

The parable of Heaven is poetic. It is presented as a given and a presupposition necessary for the rest of the story. We are not permitted to investigate the story in any way. Right away this form of story shows us that it is poetic rather than metaphysical. Why are the extensions, (emanations) of God’s Love, called His “Son?”  His “Son” is totally One with God and there is no place where the Father ends and the Son begins. There is no observer in this Heaven. It is obvious that Helen Schucman’s need to solve her life-long problems with Christianity created the form of Heaven. The “Son” is not literally a metaphysical principle. It is personal poetry. No other religion besides Christianity has the need to talk about God and His Son! This poetic presupposition to the story shows us that we are in a closed system of thought.   Now there are all sorts of problems with any closed thought system. The first is that it encourages “belief,” and to minds searching for Truth, “belief” is the booby prize. If it is a closed thought system, I would run away from it as fast as I could because it would promote duality in a sneaky way. The Course would be set in opposite to other wisdom traditions. I would be a Hindu OR a Course student. I would be a Buddhist OR a Course student. I would “believe” in the Course OR Scientology!

As I have said many times, believe no spiritual system. Be innocent of belief. Belief is the booby prize. Belief is always in another. It lacks the validity of personal experience. When you have experienced something, you know it. It has its own validity. You don't need to believe in it. The danger inherent in all spiritual systems is that they use words, diagrams, pictures, which the teacher believes have inherent value in teaching you the system of thought. Subconsciously that encourages "belief" in the system. The poor learner thinks the words and pictures ARE the truth, and when the words run out, they are bereft, asking the teacher for more words and diagrams. In such a manner is confusion given to yearning hearts and peace does not appear on their brows.

In the wisdom traditions of the world, closed systems are avoided by dialogue. Hinduism and Buddhism have a history of 3,000 years of dialogue and both have enriched the other. Taoism and Buddhism have a similar long history of dialogue which produced Zen. If the Course would be something other than a closed belief system it would need to be in dialogue with other wisdom traditions.

The second problem with any belief system is that it is a product of the mind. In a Zen Koan it is said, “If you work on your mind with your mind how will you avoid an immense confusion?” Now the religions of the West try to get out of this mess by saying, “Our religions are not thoughts of OUR minds, but God’s! He revealed his timeless truth to us. Our belief systems are really God’s belief system.” It is very clever but is it true? How would God devise a thought system? He would have to be a God who is very busy in “thought,” wouldn’t he? Then he could dictate that thought system to a human being. This form is all a part of the Judaeo-Christian presuppositions for their religion and a lot of us have seen through that form as containing nothing but a projection of human thought into an anthropomorphic idea of God. Yahweh and Jehovah are an embarrassment to the very theologies that depend on them. People have seen through them! All closed systems of thought bring people to a place where they have to break out of them! There is such a thing as direct revelation but it would come to you, in stillness, and you would never dream of making a religion of it. Such direct revelation of knowledge is not a thought. It is beyond thought. Thought cannot touch upon it.

In the World’s wisdom traditions, interpenetration of myths and dialogue discourage belief and move the mind out of thought and into clarity. You could never imagine a truth seeker taking sides and building fences around traditions. “Hindus must only think like Hindus! Buddhists must only think like Buddhists.”  If anyone did say that, you would know he is defending a belief system and has lost his way.

One of the great teachers of ACIM was Tara Singh, an enlightened man, a luminosity on this planet. He queried his students, “Is honesty ever touched by thought?” He said, “The miracles introduce me to a pause, to a gap that is no longer touched by thought. The gap is that part which has a newness in it. ACIM terms it the holy instant, that which is not conditioned and not of time…. I begin to undo my own belief system.  Those who have discrimination are not going to fit into any belief system…Understanding could only be of that which is true and once you come upon that the words are no longer there. True understanding is independent of thought.” (Nothing Real Can Be Threatened, part one, Video, 15:00-17:00, The Joseph Plan Foundation)

“Learning without application is an illusion. It is a waste of time. It is an indulgence. Once I come to stillness anything that I would say would sound irrelevant to that stillness.(Ibid. 37:18)

Do you need to educate stillness? Do you need to educate love? Do you need to educate peace? It is what it is. Isn’t it complete unto itself? ‘Learning’ to be at peace is not going to lead us to peace. Is that becoming clear? The Course is an ‘un-learning.’As long as it is a learning, it is a belief. The Course is to be lived. Therefore it has to be read in a way that what you read is actualized right there and then. Otherwise you are not reading it. And when you start that way, to give it that space, that kind of attention, it is your mind that comes to energy and stillness. It transcends thought. Therefore in order to read ACIM and to bring it to application, you would develop one thing that you didn’t have before, discrimination. You would have the discrimination that ‘learning’ doesn’t do it. (Ibid. 33:00-48:00) That’s what I am interested in: to share that which transcends the words, and that which is not mine, not yours, but both of us, sufficiently interested can see… the actual knowing is not the word. The actual truth can never be the word. The word is never the truth..The word “God” doesn’t mean God. The word “love” does not represent Love. It’s a substitute. What about the actual? Can you learn the actual? No! You can directly experience it if you would put away your concept that you could learn it or you are going to get it tomorrow. Your ‘knowing’, you would have to question. What would Jesus teach? He would introduce you to the reality of who you are….The body senses always want to “learn.”And at the body sense level, danger and fear will always be projected. So we have to come to something that transcends the body’s senses..and when we transcend them we are not subject to time.” (Ibid. 48:00ff) “Learning by itself is a deception. Something has awakened. Let’s keep it alive. You are the glory of God.”(Tara Sing, The Silence Within, video, Joseph Plan Foundtion).

Therefore the Course is a non-belief system. It has nothing to do with belief, and anything it says will be a lie if you believe it. In order for it to be true you will have to bring it to actualization by coming to stillness and hearing the meaning for you.

What does the parable of Heaven mean? Well first we would have to ask some questions. Does it literally mean “One-ness?”  You say, “Of course. That is what it said.” But One-ness is a form of duality. It is in opposition to “Many-ness.” If you do a little interpenetration of myth as Taraji has done, we would look at this word and remember that the Hindus called Heaven/God a state of “Advaita.” It doesn’t mean One-ness, which is in opposition to Many-ness. It means, “Focused,” “Not two,” “Without a second one,” “Unique.”  So this state that Helen poetically described is a place of eternal peace and love. What about the Mind in Heaven? In Advaita Vedanta God is described as the energetic state of Non-duality, focused, not two, unique. Helen’s Heaven is not so advanced metaphysically, but it would be a mistake to think that the Mind is unconscious in Heaven. It is Loving consciousness itself without an observer, what the Hindus called Sat, Cit, Ananda, or Being, Awareness, Bliss. It is what Tillich called the Ground of all Being.

The Parable of the Split Mind, projection and the illusory world

The parable of the split mind projecting itself into a universe and a body is not literally true. As all parables, the story is not literally true. The meaning of this parable is that the simple melody (which is meaning) is hiding in the complexity of the Course. The Course is hiding the simple melody which is its message. The form of the Course is seductive. It is so beautiful you want to read it. But it is so long, reading it encourages you to believe it. You think you MUST read all the thousands of pages over and over again until you can believe it. And if you hear a simple melody in a passage, instead of shouting Eureka, you must keep reading. Why is the text so long unless it is to be believed?  Who came up with this idea that complexity was better? Not God.  In fact the Course itself says that it was the Ego who dreamed up such an idea. The form of the Course then must be the work of the Ego and whose Ego would that be but Helen Schucman’s?

The purpose of the form of the Course is to hide its simple melody. The One song is hiding in the “body” which is the complex form of the Course.

We could look at Helen’s dictation experience differently. We could say that the source of the writing was Helen’s higher Self. If she had known Jung, she could have perceived the dictation coming from the collective unconscious. The message was simple but Helen’s mind kept refusing the message and so the words kept coming and the form of the Course became more and more complex. It was Helen who said “Amen.” She finally gave up her resistance, only to take it up later with more and more writing.

If you want to be enlightened, a Zen Koan will be more helpful than a complex artistic masterpiece. If you want to be an Ego, you’ll imitate Shakespeare. If you want to “learn” you’ll need a complex body of beliefs.  So we see that the “Truth of the Course” (the correlate to the Son of God in the parable) is hiding in the ego form of the Course’s body. This is the meaning of the parable of the split mind and the projection of the Son into form. You see it is a confrontational meaning. It would ask you to see how you use the body to hide from God. The meaning is not literal. It is existential. How are you hiding from God? Do you use the body as an excuse to be unkind? Do you use the body as an excuse to act as though the evil in the world is real? You would have to question yourself, wouldn’t you? You would have to question the way you use the body; and every answer you would have to question. After a while you would reach a state of such discrimination and honesty that the mind would be stilled and the meaning would be clear to you and it would be personalized. I think this is the way to see meaning in Dr. Wapnick’s story of the Course.

“Belief” is so much easier, isn’t it?  It doesn’t take a miracle to believe something. It doesn’t require a change of consciousness to believe something. And so you believe and nothing changes for you. You are lost in your illusions. You have taken something of great value (the truth which is hiding in the Course) and fed it to the pigs of belief. And thousands of you have done this. You think those charts you see are really true! They are not true. They are forms. They are dangerous to use in teaching, just as it is dangerous to offer martinis to alcoholics. You are addicted to belief. Why place the temptation in front of you?

Jesus gives a great saying to which all Course students should give heed.

"Do not give dogs what is sacred; do not throw your pearls to pigs. If you do, they may trample them under their feet, and then turn and tear you to pieces.” (Matt. 7:6)

If you believe the Course literally, your belief will turn on you and give you only more illusions.

Truth was hiding itself in the form of Helen Schucman, or equally true, we could say: The Form of Helen Schucman was hiding from the Truth, and Truth became aware of itself. This was the voice Helen heard. Truth hides in complex forms. It is the old story of hide and seek. It’s not serious. The Atman is hiding in a body of form, but the Atman made aware of itself is the Brahman. The two are the same. We will keep coming back to this Hindu myth to see how it enlightens the parables in the Course’s story as told by Dr. Wapnick. In this way I am using Alan Watts’ hermeneutic of “The Chinese Box” on the Course, and just as Watts used it on the Bible purely as an artistic endeavor, so I am doing it with the Course.

The same truth that hid in Helen’s body hid itself again in the body of the Course. This is the meaning behind the split mind parable in the story. Truth is hiding itself in form and becoming aware of itself.

But you would need to personalize that meaning. In what way do you use your body to hide from the Truth? Are you aware of Truth in you? Do you know that all you need to do to know Truth is to know yourself fully? Would you know yourself? It would take more than belief, wouldn’t it? It would take honesty and discrimination. Are you willing? Truth is hiding itself in you and asking you to look for it. Will you join in the hunt?

“The truth that is Peace fills my bones. Too long has it hidden there entrancing me to search for it. Now it wishes to speak and to be known as it is known. A welcomed guest it is, Prodigal to me. A happy home I will make for it and I will listen. For this one is bone of my bone and Self of myself” (Joseph Shore)

The parable of projection and the illusory world is not literally true. It is like all other forms. The truth is hiding in it and must be searched for.  Freud has not literally conquered the heavens and earth. Freudianism has not literally replaced cosmology, theology, philosophy, physics, astrophysics, quantum mechanics, archaeology, paleontology, geology and a thousand other sciences. If you try to believe that the parable of projection is literally true you are no different from any other fundamentalist who believes in the Bible’s creation stories literally. You have made the same mistake as the person who believes literally that the earth was created in 4004BC by a single entity god known as Yahweh who used the “poof” method for creation. “Poof” there was life.  How people struggle to believe it. They get control of school boards and demand the “poof” theory be taught in schools. They believe their Bible is the answer to Geology, physics, psychology…You name it. The Bible explains it. If you think I am exaggerating here I can tell you that I have sat in lectures where the teacher used the Bible to overrule Geology, Paleontology Physics, Biology…You name it and the Bible has the real answer for it. “All those scientists are wrong and it is up to us believers to fight them.” Their absurdity is utterly apparent to all who are not caught in their literal belief mistake.

I remember a fundamentalist student in seminary who was arguing with the Professor about Genesis. Dr. Clyde Francisco was trying to explain how one can tell story from truth. The first rule was to read the story all the way through and see how hard it would be to believe literally. The second rule was, if you find yourself in a fantasy land by literal belief, you have missed the story’s meaning. He was discussing the Genesis parable of the talking snake to a room full of Baptists as he said, “Now you know the story is just a parable because the snake talks. Snakes don’t talk in real life.” A hand shot up in the class from one of the fundamentalists. “Well they do in the Bible.”  He was a true believer. He had drunk the cool aide. He BELIEVED in the story. He was in a fantasy land where meaning could not find its way to him. In just this same fantasy land are students of the Course who believe its parables literally. This is not a didactic correction that I am offering. This is not some little paper on Form Criticism that I am going to hand in to the teacher. You see if you try to believe the parables literally you will not be able to actualize their meaning into your life.

James Hillman wrote a wonderful book called, We’ve Had A Hundred Years of Psychotherapy And The World Is Getting Worse. Some people have been studying ACIM for forty years and they are, at the very least, not getting any better. They must be studying it in a wrong way.

 Let’s look at how we search for meaning in stories. One of our most important tools is comparative research. We look in literature to see where the snake story (for example) began. We find that the Babylonians had stories about snakes in their Gilgamesh Epic.  Utnapishtim tells Gilgamesh about a magic plant under the water that can give immortality. Gilgamesh dives to find it. He recovers it and brings it back with him. Later, while Gilgamesh is sleeping, a snake emerges and snatches the magical plant from him. The snake eats it, sheds its skin, and then disappears again. Thus Gilgamesh lost the power of immortality, stolen by the snake.  There were many such stories of snakes but the Hebrews came in contact with this story when they were captives in Babylon.  The creation stories in Genesis were redacted about this time.

We need to use the same tools in looking for the meaning of the parables in the Course-Story.  When we look for meaning in forms beware of voices who counsel you “don’t look there.”  Fundamentalists believe that THEIR STORIES are unique and impervious to analysis. Snakes talk in their stories.

The law of simplicity is summed up in Jesus’ statement:

Matthew 7:12 “So in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the Law and the Prophets.”

The law and the prophets were almost as long and complicated as ACIM. Jesus said, in essence, find the simple meaning, and don’t get lost in complex forms.

The same message is given in the Gospel of John where his Christ says to the Jewish scholars:

"You search the Scriptures, because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is these that bear witness of Me; and you are unwilling to come to Me, that you may have life." (John 5:39,40). In other words, truth is so well hidden in the Scriptures not even you scholars can find it, but I am here and the truth is in me. That is to say, ‘I am awake.’”

The parable of the Ego and the Son of God

This parable may sound familiar because there is a gem dandy version of it in the Bible.

Mat 3:13  Just at that time Jesus, coming from Galilee to the Jordan, presents Himself to John to be baptized by him.

Mat 3:14  John protested. "It is I," he said, "who have need to be baptized by you, and do you come to me?"

Mat 3:15  "Let it be so on this occasion," Jesus replied; "for so we ought to fulfil every religious duty." Then he consented;

Mat 3:16  and Jesus was baptized, and immediately went up from the water. At that moment the heavens opened, and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and alighting upon Him,

Mat 3:17  while a voice came from Heaven, saying, "This is My Son, the dearly loved, in whom is My delight."

Mat 4:1  At that time Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the Desert in order to be tempted by the Devil.

Mat 4:2  There He fasted for forty days and nights; and after that He suffered from hunger.

Mat 4:3  So the Tempter came and said, "If you are the Son of God, command these stones to turn into loaves."

Mat 4:4  "It is written," replied Jesus, "'IT IS NOT ON BREAD ALONE THAT A MAN SHALL LIVE, BUT ON WHATSOEVER GOD SHALL APPOINT.'"

Mat 4:5  Then the Devil took Him to the Holy City and caused Him to stand on the roof of the Temple,

Mat 4:6  and said, "If you are God's Son, throw yourself down; for it is written, "'TO HIS ANGELS HE WILL GIVE ORDERS CONCERNING THEE, AND ON THEIR HANDS THEY SHALL BEAR THEE UP, LEST AT ANY MOMENT THOU SHOULDST STRIKE THY FOOT AGAINST A STONE.'"

Mat 4:7  "Again it is written," replied Jesus, "'THOU SHALT NOT PUT THE LORD THY GOD TO THE PROOF.'"

Mat 4:8  Then the Devil took Him to the top of an exceedingly lofty mountain, from which he caused Him to see all the Kingdoms of the world and their splendour,

Mat 4:9  and said to Him, "All this I will give you, if you will kneel down and do me homage."

Mat 4:10  "Begone, Satan!" Jesus replied; "for it is written, 'TO THE LORD THY GOD THOU SHALT DO HOMAGE, AND TO HIM ALONE SHALT THOU RENDER WORSHIP.'"

Mat 4:11  Thereupon the Devil left Him, and angels at once came and ministered to Him.

The two parables, one from the Course-Story and one from the Bible have the same essential meaning. In the Course the Separated Son (the observer Son) is tempted by the ego to believe his story. In the Bible the Son of God is tempted by the devil to believe his version of the world. In the Bible, the Son makes the right choice. In the Course he makes the wrong choice. Imagine what illusion would have been put into the world if Jesus had chosen for the devil!

The meaning of both parables is that as soon as the son becomes an observer he is immediately aware of two possibilities in everything. There is good and bad, up and down, in and out in a world of duality. The meaning is existential rather than literal. We find ourselves constantly having to choose. The message in both parables is that the Holy Spirit is there in the moment to help us choose. The anxiety in the moment and event of choosing is in the mind. You may call it the devil or the ego if you wish. But God is there in that event too and angels are waiting for you just as they did for Jesus. Are you aware of all the choices you are making within your world of duality? Do you watch CNN or some other news channel on TV and take sides? Who is right? Who is wrong?  There are thousands of choices you make every day and you choose for duality. Something is right. Something is wrong. Someone is nice. Someone is bad. Some drinks you like and some you don’t. Endlessly on and on through the day, the choices come and you choose the easy way. You choose duality. If you had been Jesus in the parable, you would have chosen for the devil!

 Now into this life of yours the parable of the two minds comes to you from ACIM and says, “Choose again.” You made a choice that enslaved you to dualism.  Think of ACIM as having poetic meaning with universal overtones rather than literal metaphysical language.

This poem that I wrote describes the journey into dualism and the path out of it. 

The parable of the two minds: The Course gives a parable to explain this choice. It says there is a wrong mind and a right mind. The wrong mind is the ego’s view of things and the right mind is the Holy Spirit which whispers to the observer son that nothing has been done to separate him from God,  that everything is as it was and the son is only dreaming. In the Course the son makes the wrong choice and believes the ego and a whole catastrophe appears to happen in his dream. The Bible contains a similar parable which is even more descriptive of the whole process. It is called the parable of the prodigal son.

 ¹¹ Jesus continued: “There was a man who had two sons. ¹² The younger one said to his father, ‘Father, give me my share of the estate.’ So he divided his property between them.

   ¹³ “Not long after that, the younger son got together all he had, set off for a distant country and there squandered his wealth in wild living. ¹⁴ After he had spent everything, there was a severe famine in that whole country, and he began to be in need. ¹⁵ So he went and hired himself out to a citizen of that country, who sent him to his fields to feed pigs. ¹⁶ He longed to fill his stomach with the pods that the pigs were eating, but no one gave him anything.

   ¹⁷ “When he came to his senses, he said, ‘How many of my father’s hired servants have food to spare, and here I am starving to death! ¹⁸ I will set out and go back to my father and say to him: Father, I have sinned against heaven and against you. ¹⁹ I am no longer worthy to be called your son; make me like one of your hired servants.’ ²⁰ So he got up and went to his father.

   “But while he was still a long way off, his father saw him and was filled with compassion for him; he ran to his son, threw his arms around him and kissed him.

   ²¹ “The son said to him, ‘Father, I have sinned against heaven and against you. I am no longer worthy to be called your son.’

   ²² “But the father said to his servants, ‘Quick! Bring the best robe and put it on him. Put a ring on his finger and sandals on his feet. ²³ Bring the fattened calf and kill it. Let’s have a feast and celebrate. ²⁴ For this son of mine was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found.’ So they began to celebrate. “

This is the meaning of the parable if we just concentrate on the lost son. The elder son has very little significance here for our purposes. The son wants to leave his Father to become an individual. This is very much like the tiny mad idea in the Course. So the son leaves his Father’s home and journeys into the world. In the Course, the son falls for the ego’s story and projects a world. The prodigal son takes with him into his fantasy world the memory of his Father and his home. In the Course, the son takes the same with him into his projected world. The prodigal believes he has sinned against heaven and his father. He experiences guilt. Finally, when things go so badly for him, the memory of his Father is greater than his desire to be an individual. He starts the long journey to home. His Father sees him a long ways off, and runs to him and kisses him. His Father did not make the prodigal’s sin real. He let it pass by. And there is great rejoicing that home is now complete again.

This is the meaning behind both parables in the Course and in the Bible. But as I told you, this is just a story and the fact that I have explained it to you in words doesn’t make it any less a story. If you would know the meaning of these parables you would have to actualize them in your life.

First you would have to find stillness, and in that stillness is newness, sparkling potential for consciousness changing. In that stillness is the “miracle” that would bring the meaning to you in a personal way. It won’t do any good for me to give you a didactic lesson and preach to you:”See now that you don’t leave your Father’s House;” because that is just preaching and cannot bring you to truth.  As before, you would have to look at your life and ask yourself if you see a pattern of wrong choice in your life. Are you always leaving the “home” of peace and going into the far country of arrogance? Are you an arrogant person? You would have to ask yourself and then you would have to question all the answers you give. Eventually you would come to stillness and in the newness, the space that is there, you would remember to laugh at your silly arrogance and choose to go home where Love has always been waiting for you.

In order to find meaning in this complex parable of projection we will need to look at other creation myths in the world’s wisdom traditions. 

In Hinduism the world is said to be “Maya,” the magical, wonderful work of the greatest of Magicians, Brahman. Mayah is often translated “illusion” but it means far more than that. It means “WOW.” As a kid watches the fireworks display on the fourth of July and says “Wow,” the Hindus view the world in this way many times greater.  It is my artistic contention that the Hindu myth can enlighten the myth in the Course of the illusory world and self. As I have kept reminding you, the Course was written by Freudian psychologists. When the Course says that the world is an illusion, it speaks as if it means, a psychiatric illusion, like schizophrenics have.  This kind of language smacks of 19^th century reductionism, a world view that had trapped Freud.  The Hindus were far ahead of Western fantasies of reductionism.  As all along we have been using the hermeneutic of “the Chinese Box” on the Course, we find here that Hinduism can enlighten the Course’s stiff, stern language.

“In Advaita Vedanta philosophy, Maya is the limited, purely physical and mental reality in which our everyday consciousness has become entangled. Maya is held to be an illusion, a veiling of the true, unitary Self — the Cosmic Spirit also known as Brahman. The concept of Maya was introduced by the great ninth-century Hindu philosopher Adi Shankara.^[2] He refuses, however, to explain the relationship between Brahman and Maya.^[3]

“Many philosophies and religions seek to "pierce the veil" of Maya in order to glimpse the transcendent truth from which the illusion of a physical reality springs, drawing from the idea that first came to life in the Hindu stream of Vedanta.

“Maya is a fact in that it is the appearance of phenomena. Since Brahman is the only truth, Maya is true but not the truth, the difference being that the truth is the truth forever while what is true is only true for now. Since Maya causes the material world to be seen, it is true in itself but is untrue in comparison to the Brahman. On the other hand, Maya is not false. It is true in itself but untrue in comparison with the absolute truth. In this sense, reality includes Maya and the Brahman. The goal of spiritual enlightenment ought to be to see Brahman and Maya and distinguish between them. Hence, Maya is described as indescribable. Maya has two principal functions: one is to veil Brahman and obscure and conceal it from our consciousness; the other is to present and promulgate the material world and the veil of duality instead of Brahman. The veil of Maya may be pierced, and, with diligence and grace, may be permanently rent. Consider an illusion of a rope being mistaken for a snake in the darkness. Just as this illusion gets destroyed when true knowledge of the rope is perceived, similarly, Maya gets destroyed for a person when they perceive Brahman with transcendental knowledge. A metaphor is also given — when the reflection of Brahman falls on Maya, Brahman appears as God (the Supreme Lord). Pragmatically, where the duality of the world is regarded as true, Maya becomes the divine magical power of the Supreme Lord. Maya is the veritable fabric of duality, and she performs this role at the behest of the Supreme Lord. God is not bound by Maya, just as magicians do not believe the illusions of their own magic.” (Maya, from Wikipedia discussion)

In the night of Brahma he dreams the dream of the world (by divine play, ‘lila,’ using Maya) In the day of Brahma he awakens to himself and the universe disappears. 

We have here a myth which differs from the Course, but the Hindu myth is able to include the Course’s myth within it and clarify it, while the Course’s myth cannot contain the Hindu myth.

Let’s look at the Hindu and Chinese parables, but they are very long so let us just look at the gist of them and who better to do that for us than Alan Watts:

“There are at least two other models of the universe which have been highly influential in human history. One is dramatic, where God is not the skillful maker of the world standing above it as its artificer and King, but where God is the actor of the world as an actor of a stage play –the actor who is playing all the parts at once. In essence this is the Hindu model of the universe. Everybody is God in a mask, and of course our own word "person" is from the Latin, persona: "That through which comes sound."This word was used for the masks worn by actors in the Greco-Roman theater, which being an open-air theater required a projection of the voice. The word person has, however, in the course of time, come to mean "the real you." In Hindu thought, every individual as a person is a mask; fundamentally this is a mask of the godhead – a mask of a godhead that is the actor behind all parts and the player of all games. That is indefinable for the same reason that you cannot bite your own teeth. You can never get at it for the same reason that you cannot look straight into your own eyes: It is in the middle of everything, the circle whose center is everywhere, and whose circumference is nowhere.” (Alan Watts, The Philosophies of Asia, pp.16-17)

Watts himself had a preference to one of these models and he slipped it into a little book for his children entitled THE BOOK on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are.  He explains:

“Myth, then, is the form in which I try to answer when children ask me those fundamental metaphysical questions which come so readily to their minds: "Where did the world come from?" "Why did God make the world?" "Where was I before I was born?" "Where do people go when they die?" Again and again I have found that they seem to be satisfied with a simple and very ancient story, which goes something like this:

"There was never a time when the world began, because it goes round and round like a circle, and there is no place on a circle where it begins. Look at my watch, which tells the time; it goes round, and so the world repeats itself again and again. But just as the hour-hand of the watch goes up to twelve and down to six, so, too, there is day and night, waking and sleeping, living and dying, summer and winter. You can't have any one of these without the other, because you wouldn't be able to know what black is unless you had seen it side-by-side with white, or white unless side-by-side with black. "In the same way, there are times when the world is, and times when it isn't, for if the world went on and on without rest forever and ever, it would get horribly tired of itself. It comes and it goes. Now you see it; now you don't. So because it doesn't get tired of itself, it always comes back again after it disappears. It's like your breath: it goes in and out, in and out, and if you try to hold it in all the time you feel terrible. It's also like the game of hide-and-seek, because it's always fun to find new ways of hiding, and to seek for someone who doesn't always hide in the same place."God also likes to play hide-and-seek, but because there is nothing outside God, he has no one but himself to play with. But he gets over this difficulty by pretending that he is not himself. This is his way of hiding from himself. He pretends that he is you and I and all the people in the world, all the animals, all the plants, all the rocks, and all the stars. In this way he has strange and wonderful adventures, some of which are terrible and frightening. But these are just like bad dreams, for when he wakes up they will disappear."Now when God plays hide and pretends that he is you and I, he does it so well that it takes him a long time to remember where and how he hid himself. But that's the whole fun of it—just what he wanted to do. He doesn't want to find himself too quickly, for that would spoil the game. That is why it is so difficult for you and me to find out that we are God in disguise, pretending not to be himself. But when the game has gone on long enough, all of us will wake up, stop pretending, and remember that we are all one single Self—the God who is all that there is and who lives forever and ever.

"Of course, you must remember that God isn't shaped like a person. People have skins and there is always something outside our skins. If there weren't, we wouldn't know the difference between what is inside and outside our bodies. But God has no skin and no shape because there isn't any outside to him. [With a sufficiently intelligent child, I illustrate this with a Möbius strip—a ring of paper tape twisted once in such a way that it has only one side and one edge.] The inside and the outside of God are the same. And though I have been talking about God as 'he' and not 'she,' God isn't a man or a woman. I didn't say 'it' because we usually say 'it' for things that aren't alive. "God is the Self of the world, but you can't see God for the same reason that, without a mirror, you can't see your own eyes, and you certainly can't bite your own teeth or look inside your head. Your self is that cleverly hidden because it is God hiding.

"You may ask why God sometimes hides in the form of horrible people, or pretends to be people who suffer great disease and pain. Remember, first, that he isn't really doing this to anyone but himself. Remember, too, that in almost all the stories you enjoy there have to be bad people as well as good people, for the thrill of the tale is to find out how the good people will get the better of the bad. It's the same as when we play cards. At the beginning of the game we shuffle them all into a mess, which is like the bad things in the world, but the point of the game is to put the mess into good order, and the one who does it best is the winner. Then we shuffle the cards once more and play again, and so it goes with the world."

“This story, obviously mythical in form, is not given as a scientific description of the way things are. Based on the analogies of games and the drama, and using that much worn-out word "God" for the Player, the story claims only to be like the way things are. I use it just as astronomers use the image of inflating a black balloon with white spots on it for the galaxies, to explain the expanding universe. But to most children, and many adults, the myth is at once intelligible, simple, and fascinating. By contrast, so many other mythical explanations of the world are crude, tortuous, and unintelligible. But many people think that believing in the unintelligible propositions and symbols of their religions is the test of true faith. "I believe," said Tertullian of Christianity, "because it is absurd. (from Alan Watts, The Book on the Taboo of Knowing Who You Are, pp.16ff")”

In Hinduism, the absolute reality is Brahman and he is not only Being, but also Awareness and Bliss. God is sat, cit ananda., the energetic state of non-duality.  We have been using this Hindu model all along as we looked at form and content because it is an illuminating model for the Course-story.. This is Watts’ hermeneutic of “The Chinese Box.”

There are parts of the text of the Course which are elegant usages of the Hindu Vedanta, but as a whole the Course does not read well as philosophy or theology. It is a work of art.  It would be very helpful to look at the Primordial Tradition and compare the Course. Wapnick, however, disagrees:

“Another form of this mistake is the common practice of including A Course in Miracles with what Aldous Huxley termed ‘the perennial philosophy,’ a catch-all phrase used to embrace the major mystical traditions of the world.  Again, this does the Course a profound disservice, because it blurs what is its distinctive contribution to the world's spiritualities: the idea that not only was the physical universe an illusion that God did not create, but that it was also ‘made as an attack’ on Him (W-pII.3.2:1). This profound and sophisticated psychological principle, integrated with a pure non-dualistic metaphysics is what renders A Course in Miracles unique among the spiritual and religious thought systems of the world. “(Question 56 from The Most Commonly Asked Questions About 
A Course in Miracles By Gloria and Kenneth Wapnick, Ph.D., used by permission.)

I have to disagree with that conclusion. Other scholars are not as sure as Dr. Wapnick.  Dr.s Roger Walsh and Frances Vaughan consider the Course to be another form of the primordial tradition found in all religions. In their book Paths beyond Egos, they counsel us that theirs is “a clarion call for an expanded vision of human possibilities.  In it, many of the best thinkers of our day ask us to renew the perennial search for self-knowledge and to discover the deeper meaning of our lives.

“For this, they offer the transpersonal perspective—which extends beyond conventional psychology and science to include the study of consciousness in its myriad forms, including altered states, yoga, dreams, and contemplation.  This marriage of psychology and science with the spiritual traditions has borne ripe fruit: the transpersonal vision, which offers a uniquely generous and encompassing view of human nature.” (from the book description Paths Beyond Ego:The Transpersonal Vision,Roger Walsh & Frances Vaughan (eds.). Publisher by Tarcher)  

In other words, there are worlds beyond Freudianism. Helen Schucman was a Freudian. The concept of projection appealed to her. It was an artistic choice from her ego mind. It also came out of her existential situation. Helen worked with doubt and guilt her whole life. Remember that the goal of a parable or a myth is not to claim the world is literally such and such, but to say the world is sort of like this.

In the video put out by the Course’s foundation, The Story of A Course in Miracles, Dr. Walsh states that the Course is a form of the perennial philosophy.”The Course seems to represent a contemporary Christian example of this perennial wisdom or perennial philosophy…the world religions contain roadmaps  for training the mind to induce transcendental states of consciousness, the transcendental states of consciousness from which they originally sprang.”(Dr.Roger Walsh, The Story of A Course in Miracles video 1hr.20 minutes)

Actually Dr. Walsh’s opinion is rather generous to the Course. The question is not whether the Course is distinct from the Primordial Tradition in any meaningful way. The question is whether the Course rises to the level of the Tradition. The Course is a beautiful work of art and is best viewed that way. But it does not read well as philosophy or theology. Can we really say that the Course is in the same league as Taoism, Hinduism, and Buddhism? These are wisdom traditions of the world which have lasted for three thousand years. The Course cannot even hold together for 40 years!  Wapnick has said that the Course is a thought-system (“We intellectuals need a thought system too”). But can we really say that the Course is in the big leagues with Rene Guenon, Frithjof Schuon, Elémire Zolla, Julius Evola, Ananda Coomaraswamy, Alain Danielou, Jean-Louis Michon, or Gottfried Leibniz?  I don’t see how we can make such a leap without becoming literal believers in the Course, assigning to it “specialness” and demanding that it stand apart from the world’s wisdom traditions without interaction or analysis. Were we to do so, we would make ACIM a cult.

Tara Singh taught the Course by fully utilizing all of his experiences with the East. Yoga, meditation, retreat and service to humanity were his paths and he brought them all to the Course. Naturally he would share wisdom from those fountains when he shared the Course with students. Taraji saw the wisdom of interconnectedness. He told his students, “Today I am teaching ACIM. Tomorrow I may teach from the Koran…and you will all go away. The name of Allah is holy.” Can you imagine another teacher of the Course saying, “Tomorrow I may teach from the Koran?”  If you cannot maybe you should question your “learning.” Maybe you have just been “believing” the Course as a belief system and setting it in a dualistic competition against other wisdom traditions. It is easy to do. Tara Singh was an enlightened man. In his sharing with his students entitled, “What is the Christ? The Time for Learning is Over,” Taraji explained the “Christ” as the “Atman.” 

“What is the Christ? The very thought of it brings order in life. It brings that attention. What is the Christ? It is that part of you that He created and you cannot invade it and change it…Once you come to the real stillness you would not want to change it. ..You are the Christ. Why search for Christ outside? Then gratefulness and gladness comes into being. How spacious is silence? How pure it is? …The stillness of the peace of God is mine and you would see that that stillness does not depart. It brings everything to order. You see the presence that is here will solve all the problems if you are willing to have the ears to here.”

This is a perfect expression of Vedanta. Only the name “Christ” has been substituted for the Atman. In this way Taraji brought the meaning of the Course closer to his students.

So far we have been looking at the epic “story” of ACIM (according to Dr. Wapnick) but we have not been looking at the Course directly. Perhaps we do need to “forgive” the Course story for some of its components.  Any time someone tells the “story” of the Course, whether it is Dr. Wapnick, Robert Perry, Gary Renard, or a film producer, as in the movie, “The Story of A Course in Miracles,” the story will be flawed because the story is not literally true. In art we have similar things to consider. No composer was perfect, with the possible exception of Mozart. Indeed opera singers and critics alike seem to think that the Holy Trinity has been expanded to make room for Mozart.  I specialized in singing Verdi. Verdi was far from perfect. Early Verdi operas, especially, are imperfect creations. We easily forgive the flaws. We just look past them and enjoy the genius we are given.  I sang the title role of his most perfect opera, Falstaff. I sang his later period works like Aida, Un Ballo in Maschera, and La Forza del Destino. I sang his middle works like Macbeth, Rigoletto, La Traviata and Il Trovatore.  And I sang one of his early operas, Attila.  There is a clear progression of genius from the early to the later works. We see the flaws in the earlier works but that does not keep them from being inspirational to the public blessed enough to see them.  Whatever flaws there are in Course-stories, we can easily forgive them. It is far more important for us to look at how we can “un-learn” our belief systems with the Course itself and remove the barriers to the awareness of Love’s Presence. Nothing else about the Course is really important. Yes, the poetry of the text is a great work of art, but if you just read it as a poem, you may miss actualizing its Truth. The content of the Course impregnates every page. Every line contains within it the Truth to bring you to Peace. So why are people reading it thousands of times? Taraji (Tara Singh) says that they do not know how to read the Course. He said that one must be able to read a line in the Course in such a way that one is able then and there, in that moment, to actualize the meaning into one’s life. The Course itself gives the direction in how to read it:

“Let us be still an instant, and forget all things we ever learned, all thoughts we had, and every preconception that we hold of what things mean, and what their purpose is. Let us remember not our own ideas of what the world is for. We do not know.”

 I will repeat here Taraji’s comments to his students, to which I referred earlier.

Tara Singh (Taraji) said to his students: “The miracles introduce me to a pause, to a gap that is no longer touched by thought. The gap is that part which has a newness in it. ACIM terms it the holy instant, that which is not conditioned and not of time…. I begin to undo my own belief system. Those who have discrimination are not going to fit into any belief system…Understanding could only be of that which is true and once you come upon that the words are no longer there. True understanding is independent of thought.” (Nothing Real Can Be Threatened, part one, Video, 15:00-17:00, The Joseph Plan Foundation)
“Learning without application is an illusion. It is a waste of time. It is an indulgence. Once I come to stillness anything that I would say would sound irrelevant to that stillness.(Ibid. 37:18)
Do you need to educate stillness? Do you need to educate love? Do you need to educate peace? It is what it is. Isn’t it complete unto itself? ‘Learning’ to be at peace is not going to lead us to peace. Is that becoming clear? The Course is an ‘un-learning.’As long as it is a learning, it is a belief. The Course is to be lived. Therefore it has to be read in a way that what you read is actualized right there and then. Otherwise you are not reading it. And when you start that way, to give it that space, that kind of attention, it is your mind that comes to energy and stillness. It transcends thought. Therefore in order to read ACIM and to bring it to application, you would develop one thing that you didn’t have before, discrimination. You would have the discrimination that ‘learning’ doesn’t do it. (Ibid. 33:00-48:00) That’s what I am interested in: to share that which transcends the words, and that which is not mine, not yours, but both of us, sufficiently interested can see… the actual knowing is not the word. The actual truth can never be the word. The word is never the truth..The word “God” doesn’t mean God. The word “love” does not represent Love. It’s a substitute. What about the actual? Can you learn the actual? No! You can directly experience it if you would put away your concept that you could learn it or you are going to get it tomorrow. Your ‘knowing’, you would have to question. What would Jesus teach? He would introduce you to the reality of who you are….The body senses always want to “learn.”And at the body sense level, danger and fear will always be projected. So we have to come to something that transcends the body’s senses..and when we transcend them we are not subject to time.” (Ibid. 48:00ff) “Learning by itself is a deception. Something has awakened. Let’s keep it alive. You are the glory of God.”(Tara Sing, The Silence Within, video, Joseph Plan Foundtion).

In a video of his sharing with students called “The Silence Within,” Tara Singh showed how the Course as a text and workbook should be studied. He took one line from a lesson, and using Eastern techniques of dialogue and investigation, a holy space was created. He did not tell the story of the Course over and over again as though to make his students believe it. By his holy attentiveness and willingness he exposed his students to the full meaning in the Course, found purely in one line. The holiness is so profound that it seeps through the DVD and into the viewer’s lap. This is what I have meant all along as I have said the meaning of the Course is hiding in every form, and also that all the meaning necessary to find Peace is present in every line! Why are you reading thousands of pages unless you are trying to believe the Course? Why are you making it a ritual to do the lesson in the workbook every day?  If you prepared yourself properly for the lesson, you would first have to invoke the Presence. You would have to become ready for the lesson. Then quiet would come. Stillness would come and bring gratefulness with it. In the space that this would create, the meaning would be presented to you for actualization right then and there!

Now I speak as one who has been a teacher of the Course and I fully admit that when I was teaching the Course I was unhealed. It is little wonder then that our sessions drifted into simple beliefs. No one was changed. After a couple of hours the members drifted away to go back to selling real estate and they were no different than when they came to the session. Nothing had been done. ACIM was just a chic, nouveau game being played. This is not an unusual scene among ACIM students.

It would be theologically convenient to say that once someone has experienced the Peace of God he is immediately enlightened and will never lose that peace. That would be a sort of Calvinism for the Course. Unfortunately it is not true. We can allow the world to steal that peace if we are not vigilant against dualism. Full enlightenment then would mean something more than just experiencing peace once. It would mean that all one’s work is done. I’ll never forget my first telephone conversation with Judy Skutch. I was new to the Course, having just made a break with the church. She said, “All those Christians who think they are going to go to heaven when they die are going to be very surprised. If they haven’t done all their work they are not going.”  I thought then that this sounded like a psychologist’s view of salvation. “Come to all your therapy sessions and do your work or you won’t go to heaven!”  It still strikes me as a theory of salvation by works gone mad! Has no one ever heard of the Grace of God? Who among us couldn’t use a little more of the Grace of God? What then is “all the work” we are supposed to do? Is it personal karma that has to be completed? We know that our work of forgiveness must be done. There can be not one blot of darkness held against any brother in any part of the mind.  Tara Singh meant it when he said that “whatever my brother does to me I will not hate him for it.” That is the work we have to do. That would be non-reactivity to the world. Are you there?

I have experienced the Peace of God. I have experienced what RM Buck called “Cosmic Consciousness.” Of course I want it to transform my ordinary waking consciousness! Just as surely, it comes and goes. I wrote a defiant post on my Facebook that said”

“How easy it is to get off track. If I truly want the Peace of God then I cannot allow the circumstances of life to steal that Peace. Not only do I have to forgive my brother, I have to let the world pass without believing in it. The world is perfectly designed to steal our Peace. We should know. We made it so. I have to remember Heaven, that Sate that I also know perfectly well, that State of the awareness of Love's Presence. I can't let Osama or Obama steal my Peace. I can't let any war steal my Peace. Every time I reinforce the world with belief in it I forget God and my Home. I lose my Peace, which is impossible because in truth I AM this peace. 911 cannot steal my Peace, regardless of who did it. I cannot let you steal my Peace. Write the most stupid post that you want. I cannot let you steal my Peace. No government can steal my Peace. You can put me in a FEMA camp for being dangerous to the State but you cannot steal my Peace. I will not believe in this world. I deny it. I affirm Heaven as my home and my State of Being, and regardless of what my brother does to me, I will not hate him for it. ‘Nothing real can be threatened. Nothing unreal exists. Herein lies the Peace of God.’”

Now I truly meant those words when I wrote them. But then I go out to eat at a fine dining restaurant and the bartender is incompetent and brings me a bad drink. The chef is incompetent and brings me a bad meal, and I go nuts. I allow the circumstance to steal my Peace. Then I see what I have done!!! OMG! I need more practice at this Advaita thing!

You see how easy it is to let the world steal our peace? How many ACIM students have left a workshop and then let road rage steal their peace as they drove home?

The Truth that I am comes through MY forms. Just so you know, I was a theologian, a minister, an oral interpreter of literature, an opera singer, a university professor and a teacher of singing. Truth comes to me shaped in the forms of my life just as surely as Helen’s forms shaped the Course.

I do inspirational writing and my inner Truth speaks to me. The Voice comes from the Truth which is hiding in me. I call that Voice Jesus. This Truth is hiding in every form. The Truth spoke to me about my difficulty in sustaining Cosmic Consciousness.

“Peace comes to those who still the mind and wait. Be still and know that I am God. Stillness is hard for you. Your mind races and by yourself you cannot still the mind. That is the meaning behind the Zen proverb ‘If you work on your mind with your mind how will you avoid an immense confusion?’ And yet I can still your mind as you wait upon me. These moments of clarity have come to you often as gifts in the presence of nature. I use nature to still your mind. Your inane sense of time stops and you become aware of all there is, flooding in upon you with gentleness and wonder. You would like for these moments to be expanded into clear waking consciousness. Be grateful instead for these moments. How long could the body exist in the Presence of God? Moments will have to do while you are in the body. Do you think it was just an accident that my ministry lasted only three years? My body could not continue to exist longer while I stayed in perfect oneness with the Father. The day is coming and is almost when the veils between the ‘levels’ will be lifted and all sentient beings will be able to be aware of each other. This is the new heaven and earth the Bible speaks of. Ready yourself for it with gratitude for these moments of stillness and oneness that come to you as gifts from Spirit. Selah.”

So you see we just have to keep actualizing the Truth. We will be doing the lessons as long as we need and along the way we will have beatific visions of the final Truth.  Be grateful!!

If you want to know about life after death the Course will offer you precious little help. The “chart” has no place for it. If you want information about that you will have to go to the primordial tradition. The Tibetan Book of the Dead prepares one for all of the experiences an individual will have after death. Mahayana Buddhism, Hinduism, Theosophy, Spiritualism, Kabbalah, all have information about intermediate states between incarnations and offer views of countless heavens full of “Buddhas” and countless hells full of devils. The Course is virtually silent but strongly hints at reincarnation. We are offered the lessons we need to learn as long as is necessary for us to learn them.  Don’t think I am going into all that here! 

We have come to the end of our little walk in the woods. We started out One, diverged into two and now we are back together as “Not Two.” The theme of the journey has been remembering love through the stories we tell and the Song that Sings.

Singers, listen deep within,

And hear the Song that makes you sing.

Follow it and let it change you.

The Song that seems to be forgotten is not.

Its melody stays there, firm, beautiful,

structured as it was.

What could you do to change it?

And so it haunts you, coming back in little wisps

of memory, phrase by phrase, asking for its whole.

And you would remember.

Remember, and let the whole Song

Find itself in you.

In quiet eternity does the One Song sing,

Unaware of itself as a Song, singing only Love,

And so we say “Amen,” but just for now.