In A Course In Miracles, Jesus speaks of himself as the manifestation of the Holy Spirit and he speaks of the Holy Spirit as our memory of what we really are in truth, which is spirit, in the eternal now:
I am the manifestation of the Holy Spirit, and when you see me it will be because you have invited Him. ²For He will send you His witnesses if you will but look upon them. ³Remember always that you see what you seek, for what you seek you will find. ⁴The ego finds what it seeks, and only that. ⁵It does not find love, for that is not what it is seeking. ⁶Yet seeking and finding are the same, and if you seek for two goals you will find them, but you will recognize neither. ⁷You will think they are the same because you want both of them. ⁸The mind always strives for integration, and if it is split and wants to keep the split, it will still believe it has one goal by making it seem to be one. (ACIM, T-12.VII.6:1-8)
And:
The Holy Spirit can indeed make use of memory, for God Himself is there. ²Yet this is not a memory of past events, but only of a present state. ³You are so long accustomed to believe that memory holds only what is past, that it is hard for you to realize it is a skill that can remember now. ⁴The limitations on remembering the world imposes on it are as vast as those you let the world impose on you. ⁵There is no link of memory to the past. ⁶If you would have it there, then there it is. ⁷But only your desire made the link, and only you have held it to a part of time where guilt appears to linger still. (ACIM, T-28.I.4:1-7)
Jesus in the Course
In January of 1991 I was in Holland, visiting my mother who was ill. At that same time my old friend Yvonne van Schijndel was visiting Holland as well - she lived in Indonesia at the time, where her husband worked for Shell. I visited with her and she, who was such a knee-jerk Catholic in my high school days, had now lived all over the world and had involved herself with other religions, and finally she found herself in a Buddhist temple, meditating, and she had an experience of light, which she felt was Jesus, and it led her to seek a renewal of her religion and she became involved with a charismatic Catholic organization and with Mother Theresa. We had an interesting conversation, and as I was going through some life changes at the moment, on my way out she said to me everything would be alright, and suggested that if I wanted to know why she said that, I might want to read Jerry Jampolsky’s book Teach Only Love.
In May of 1991, I walked into Pymander Books, a metaphysical bookstore in Westport, CT, and asked the owner if she had this book, Teach Only Love by Jerry Jampolsky, and sure enough, they did have it. I proceeded to read all of Jerry Jampolsky during the rest of May and June. I was wondering increasingly why, if Jampolsky was quoting A Course In Miracles all the time, why wasn’t I reading it myself? I thought I was hearing more in the quotes than what Jampolsky wrote. By the end of June I bought my first copy of the Course, which was then still in three volumes. I looked it through, still a bit unsure, but eventually I prayed for clarity that this was really Jesus speaking to me, not more psychological claptrap, and I got my unequivocal answer through a dream experience, which removed all doubt. Eventually I read the Course in its entirety in July of 1991, 31 Chapters over 31 days. After breakfast, I would turn on the espresso machine, and sit down to read, and I did not do any work until I finished my chapter for the day, usually by early afternoon.
My wife, who worked in the library at Fairfield University, saw the books, and said to me: “Oh, you’re reading that book!” I asked her: “What do you mean “that book?” She proceeded to tell me she was almost getting a hernia from putting the Course back on the shelves, as it was the most frequently loaned out book in the library. Interesting, in a Jesuit university, where I was to graduate in 1993. Anyway, I soon found out about Ken Wapnick, and his Foundation for A Course in Miracles, then in Roscoe, NY, and by September of 1991, I attended my first workshop at the Foundation, and, until they decamped for California in 1999, I would regularly attend workshops there.
That night, when I prayed about the authenticity of the Course, my core question was if this was really Jesus speaking to me or not. From very early on, I grew up in an environment where there was respect for the Bible, but doubts about the church, and at the very least an idea that Jesus had long since left the building, if he was ever there. My major influences were a living representation of Jesus through the person of Miss Margaretha Hofmans, who channeled “God’s Help,” but always pointed out to us that we could always go to him ourselves whenever we needed it. However she would also clarify that God was not like Santa Claus, and asking for Help meant you should not just give him your wish list and hope for the best, but rather that asking for Help meant letting go of all expectations of what that Help would look like and being open for whatever form that Help might take.
An associate of Miss Hofmans was the spiritual author Johan Willem Kaiser, and I studied his work from very early. I also studied a lot of Advaita Vedanta, primarily Sri Ramakrishna, Jiddu Krishnamurti, and Sri Ramana Maharshi, who was everywhere, because of the distinctly Jungian influence in my father’s library. The Tao Teh Ching and the I Ching were early favorites also. It was through the work of Kaiser, and in particular his translation and commentary of the Gospel according to Mark, as well as my study of early Christianity, that I gradually had come to the conviction that the resurrection was really at the symbolic baptism in the River Jordan, when Jesus experienced the Voice of God saying: Thou art my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased. To me it seemed that what died on the Cross was the ego, not Jesus. In the work of Kaiser it was also clear that the story of Jesus dying for our sins was just a cowardly theological cover for the ego wanting to have its cake and eat it too.
Needless to say, I never had any truck with main stream Christian theology, even though I had been baptized in the Remonstrance Geertekerk in Utrecht.
Thankfully, the Remonstrance church was fairly liberal, such as encouraging the revolutionary idea that we can think for ourselves. Besides, my parents left the church when I was two and a half. Their further development was more along the lines of: we are spiritual, not religious, helped also by the Jungian influences in my father’s practice of psychiatry.
In short, it was evident to me even at age six that Christian theology had nothing to do with the teachings of Jesus, and that I had some awareness of a presence of “God’s Help,” in my life, but I was grossed out by the Christian stuff and avoided it like the plague. This is why, that night at the end of June 1991, when I was praying on the authenticity of the voice I heard in A Course in Miracles, it was very clear to me that it was Jesus I was looking for, not Christian theology about him, or worse, some psychological theory. And once that was established, I never looked back. Until the end of 1999, I attended dozens of workshops in Roscoe, and I consider Ken Wapnick to be my teacher.
It behooves me here also to mention my intense Bible studies, which included the fact that I had studied Hebrew, and at least some of the traditional Jewish commentaries, including Rashi, and the more modern commentaries of Samson Raphael Hirsch. I studied Hebrew Bible for a while with Rector Tom Naastenpad in Rotterdam. I taught Torah from Hirsch’s commentary for one year in the second-year Bible class at my old school. I was already used to reading my New Testament in Greek, to avoid some of the anachronistic theological mis-translations, since my mid teens. In the mid-seventies, I began to study Aramaic, when I became more conscious of the Aramaicisms in the New Testament Greek. I gave all that up, when one night I experienced the voice of Jesus, saying to me: “If I am who you think I am, don’t you think I could speak to you in any language?” And when I found my way to the Course in 1991, that experience came back to me. Any language indeed, even English!
In short, I was a bit uncomfortable with the way Ken and Gloria Wapnick spoke of the Jesus of the Bible, which was an altogether alien concept to me. However, this was not so much a disagreement, as it was a reflection of coming to the same place via different paths. Innately, I agree that the Jesus of the Course is different from the way Christian theology has framed Jesus - and that became the dominant tradition. But when Ken says “the Jesus of the Bible,” I mentally correct him and read or hear “the Jesus of the Christian Churches.” As I said, to me it was clear since ca. 1960 that Jesus was always a teacher of non-dualism, in part also due to my early acquaintance with the Gospel of Thomas, which came out in its first translation in 1959. I may not have realized it explicitly in those days, that the pre-Pauline Jesus was non-dualistic, but certainly I was clear that he was not who the churches said he was, and I read the Bible totally differently.
Likewise, when at one point Gloria speaks about the idea that there is no accounting in the church of the two creation stories in Genesis, I once sent her a copy from Rashi, to document that even in Rashi’s (1040- 1105) commentary the two somewhat contradictory creation stories were discussed, and I have certainly found discussions in Protestant commentaries, but also in modern Catholic commentaries. It might just not be discussed in catechism class. In other words, for me, the Jesus of the Course was consistent with who and what I thought Jesus was, and never with the figure that is portrayed in post-Nicene Christian theology. I am being specific, because before the First Council of Nicea in 325 AD, there were certain Christian groups who said the same as I reported above, that the resurrection was at the baptism in the River Jordan, and the hearing of God’s voice saying Thou art my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased. The Course would call that experience “accepting the atonement,” meaning the realization that the separation never happened and that we are God’s Son.
The whole purpose of this course is to teach you that the ego is unbelievable and will forever be unbelievable. ²You who made the ego by believing the unbelievable cannot make this judgment alone. ³By accepting the Atonement for yourself, you are deciding against the belief that you can be alone, thus dispelling the idea of separation and affirming your true identification with the whole Kingdom as literally part of you. ⁴This identification is as beyond doubt as it is beyond belief. ⁵Your wholeness has no limits because being is infinity. (ACIM, T-7.VIII.7:1-5)
Cindy Lora-Renard just posted a video that makes it very clear also how in the course of clearing away the obstacles to Love’s presence, as the Course describes it, we are opening up our own ability to listen to the “Voice for God,” (this is the phrase the Course uses sometimes for the Holy Spirit). But hearing voices is not the point, the point is living an inspired life in service of spirit, which is the only way to be happy, as spirit will flow through you in word and deed, and you are no longer swimming against the stream. That is the point of the Course, you can change your mind and live differently.