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ACIM is neither “religion” nor “New Age”

The explanation Jesus offered to help us with understanding came in two parts. The first was parables delivered orally in the flesh to any individuals willing to listen without committing anything to writing. His lessons were backed up by demonstrations that his incarnation in the flesh was not limited as his listeners were to the “laws” that define their “reality” of spacetime-matter. His miracles demonstrated that he clearly belonged to another dimension. The second part was writing delivered by disembodied Mind-Love through an embodied human scribe, again to any individuals willing to listen. Its purpose is to explain this other dimension and its practical relevance to the human experience.

In both cases, a few absorbed his gift with understanding while many more misunderstood. Part of my project in advancing his cause toward understanding must therefore include helping to correct misunderstanding of both Jesus and ACIM. I accept this responsibility. Minds paying attention to my task also have a responsibility. That is to suspend judgment about Jesus and his work so long as they choose not to reflect on it.

Reading ACIM is their choice. It’s none of my business. But it is my business to call out minds that weigh in on my project and the work of Jesus that inspires it without doing their homework. To familiarize themselves not with the layers of distortion that misunderstanding has covered Jesus with but with who he actually was – and is – and the explanation he actually offers. It’s there in black and white, written in the king’s English and translated into every conceivable language.

His explanation is not “religion.” The concept of “Christ” is front and center in ACIM because of its purpose and the Innocence it means, but with no reference to any of the usual trappings of organized religion – “Christian,” “Christianity,” and especially “Church,” the instrument not of “Christ’s” purity but its defilement. “Church” is anathema. ACIM is not compatible with orthodox biblical Christianity, the guilt- and fear-ridden, top-down authoritarian travesty perpetrated by the Church both Catholic and Protestant.

Jesus’ explanation is not “New Age.” New Age teaches dualistic metaphysics, the idea that the physical universe including the body was created by God. It teaches “prosperity consciousness” and emphasizes people’s positive experiences without acknowledging their unconscious feelings of guilt. It teaches that we are God. ACIM does none of this. ACIM draws upon traditional Freudian psychoanalytic principles, the Neoplatonic tradition, and themes common to early Christianity and the Gnostic systems of the second and third centuries. New Age does none of this. For these reasons ACIM is not categorized by the Library of Congress under “New Age.”*

ACIM is liberal democracy’s deepest philosophical root and its best friend

An honest and principled response to misunderstanding about Jesus and ACIM can’t be to disavow or disguise it for fear of yet more misunderstanding. It must be to include it in the explanation. Going against centuries of  conditioning by misinformation and misinterpretation may be “unrealistic,” but then so were Jesus’ miracles. Its title wasn’t given to Jesus’ book for no reason; it’s to be taken literally.

Were minds closed to understanding to open they would discover that not only are Jesus and ACIM compatible with bottom-up liberal democracy, their explanation is its deepest philosophical root. It is the clearest refutation of the lie that is authoritarian rule above the law that all of Logic, reason, passion, and goodwill can muster.

Jesus and ACIM aren’t an embarrassment, an anachronism, an awkward afterthought. They are in fact our best friend. A friend who doesn’t demand acceptance on faith. Who doesn’t demand anything. But who does offer understanding if minds freely choose to accept it. Not knuckling under to superior power. But acknowledging the only “authority” its explanation needs: its internal, intrinsic Logic.

What is the practical benefit?

If the cruel insensitivity of the Joker’s arbitrary above-the-law rule is constructed of a web of lies founded on the illogic-insanity of impossibility then the logical response is to undo its lies with the truth and the practical benefit will be release-Freedom from its cruelty.

*Source: Kenneth Wapnick, "Why A Course in Miracles is not New Age" (Letter to the Library of Congress 1990's, email received by the author from Foundation for A Course in Miracles, April 23, 2019)

 

During one of his stemwinding Sunday sermons, the Reverend A. Graham Baldwin paused for dramatic effect. It was at this precise moment that a slack-jawed day-dreaming student in the pew in front of me let loose with a belch, so deafening it could be heard from the fitting room at Elander & Swanton. The poor guy followed this up with a startled “Oh, I’m sorry!” so loud it would have bounced off the carillon at the far end of the campus.

The guy seated to his left, Peter Herrick (’56), wanted to laugh in the worst way. But of course this would have further distracted the Reverend’s rapt audience and gotten him a demerit. So, as I watched from directly behind, his neck swelled to a reddish purple like a magma chamber in a volcano while he valiantly suppressed it.

And that was it. The service and the sermon continued without further incident. Nobody got a demerit. We all continued on our way; our grasp of religious profundities forever punctuated by a resounding belch. And I got to share the memory of it with day-dreaming classmates who probably never noticed.

In The Poseidon Adventure the Gene Hackman group sought rescue in the stern, and that’s where they were found by their rescuers. En route, they passed a group heading the opposite direction toward the bow. Each thought they were right and couldn’t be persuaded to change direction. Only one was right.

The history of thinking about who we are, where we came from, and where we’re supposed to be headed, is divided into two groups, one suspecting that reason – our minds’ logical thoughts -- should be our guide, the other certain that only our bodies’ senses – our material world -- can be trusted. The great preponderance of opinion now and throughout history has sided with the latter, and it’s dead wrong. The great names in philosophy all struggle to make sense of Reality because, over and over again, they can’t reconcile what their minds want to tell them with what their bodies and their brains are telling them. The deception of appearances blocks their understanding and they come away confused, leaving us with the brilliance of insights that fall into this school or that and solve nothing.

Who is the great philosopher who got it right? Jesus! The institution and doctrine of the Church brought his light to the darkness instead of the other way around, perverted it into its opposite so that only fragments remain to connect and resonate. A Course in Miracles begins to fix all that by dredging up the darkness that was planted in our minds when the Child lost consciousness and exposing it to the light. Practicing the Course doesn’t mean pretending we’re serene boobs who are unaffected by all the shit that’s happening. It means looking right at the shit and understanding that it’s coming from within our own minds, our own psyches, it’s totally insane, and it has a totally insane purpose which is to distract us from the Innocent Child that we all are and from our Purpose which is to wake up, to get the hell out of here, get back to Creation, and get back to work!

The great names in philosophy were great minds with promising insights here and there that nevertheless couldn’t navigate through appearances and deceptions to put them together in one great and simple answer the way Jesus did. Jesus did it by leading us toward the stern, into mind, not matter, and into the dark shit that’s been interfering with great minds’ ability to reason. We do well to go to churches that remind us that we’re all nice, comfort us, and encourage us to do nice. But we could do just as well, or better, to get together and face the fact that we’re not nice; look right at our not-niceness; be horrified and dismayed at first; come to understand its absurdity and manipulative intent; laugh it right out of the building; and thus disarm it.

If only Gene Hackman didn’t have to give up his life for his group. Oh well.