Showing posts with label The Course. Show all posts
Showing posts with label The Course. Show all posts

Thursday, February 18, 2010

The Trouble with Spiritual Teachers

I've just finished a book called A Course in Miracles (the first edition is available online), and I have to say that I am no closer to working a miracle than before I started reading.

It seems to be mostly just one inane non-sequitur after another written in a kind of bible-ese, with a lot of "untos" and "wherefores" and "nors"--lots of "nors"--and awkward syntax that its authors (or as they prefer "scribes") Dr. Helen Schucman (below left) and Dr. William Thetford (below right), must have picked up from contact with the King James Version from somewhere at some point.

I shall select a passage at random to make my point. Let's try this one:

"It is through these strange and shadowy figures that the insane relate to their insane world. For they see only those who remind them of these images, and it is to them that they relate. Thus do they communicate with those who are not there, and it is they who answer them. And no one hears their answer save him who called upon them."

I'm not kidding! I picked that passage completely at random. It goes on like that, meaninglessly, for some 622 long, dense pages. It's gibberish and the intro to the book (also on the website) admits as much:

"The Text is largely theoretical, and sets forth the concepts on which the Course's thought system is based. Its ideas contain the foundation for the Workbook's lessons. Without the practical application the Workbook provides, the Text would remain largely a series of abstractions which would hardly suffice to bring about the thought reversal at which the Course aims."

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