24AR29-40

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AR 29:40 - A Course in Miracles and Christian Science

In this issue:

A COURSE IN MIRACLES - an unexpected origins update

Apologia Report 29:40 (1,681)
October 22, 2024

A COURSE IN MIRACLES

"The New Age Bible" by Sheila Heti (Harper's, Sep '24) -- the most interesting Course historical investigation we've seen yet. (Get ready for a wild ride. This theme-park upgrade is worth the admission price.)

   "Last spring, I flew across the continent to ... visit the independent publisher of A Course in Miracles. I wanted to learn more about this book, one of the strangest I had ever read. I had been in its thrall for months....

   "The Course is a thirteen-hundred-page spiritual text that was published in 1976, has sold millions of copies in dozens of languages, and has never been out of print. It was written by Helen Schucman, though her name does not appear on the cover. She felt it would be wrong, since she didn't consider herself its author, merely its "scribe."

   Back in 1965 "Helen was nearly sixty years old and for almost a decade had been working as a research psychologist at Columbia-Presbyterian, when she became aware of a mysterious inner "Voice." After she told her boss, William Thetford, with whom she was secretly in love, he, intrigued, encouraged her to write down what it said.

   "She later explained the process, which continued for seven years, as "highly interruptible"....

   "At the office I could lay down the notebook to… answer the telephone, talk to a patient ... picking up afterwards without disturbing the smooth flow of words in the slightest... It was as if the Voice merely waited until I came back and then started in again. ...

   "Helen's effortless, yearslong relationship with the "source" was unlike anything I had ever read about or experienced. ...

   "Helen Cohn was born into an emotionally distant, upper-middle-class family in 1909. Her parents were half-Jewish, her father an atheist and her mother a seeker who dabbled in theosophy. ...

   "In a series of autobiographical interviews carried out the year after Helen's death, Bill recalled that when he first met Helen, she seemed rather strange. She was obviously very bright, but a bit scattered. I had the feeling that her mind was going around in circles. There were a lot of peripheral non-sequiturs....

   "Helen called Bill in the middle of the night, panicked, and told him about an inner voice that kept repeating, "This is a course in miracles, please take notes." She asked him, "What shall I do? Suppose it's crazy." Bill told her to write down what she heard; she could read it to him the following day. "If it doesn't make any sense, no one else has to know about it," he reassured her.

   "The next morning, Helen appeared in his office with her notes and nervously read the words aloud. Bill sat quietly. He then told her it was astonishingly beautiful, and urged her to keep listening and writing. ... [S]he stated her opposition to the Voice "silently but strongly":

   ""Why me?" I asked. "I'm not even religious. I don't understand the things that have been happening to me and I don't even like them. Besides, they make me nervous. I'm just about as poor a choice as you could make."

   "On the contrary," I was quietly assured. "You are an excellent choice, and for a very simple reason. You will do it."

   "Helen realized this was true. So for the next seven years—often daily—she would visit Bill in his office and read out her notes while he typed them up. I suppose it was very convenient that their new offices were at a distance from anyone who might have wondered at their increased contact and intimacy. "Naturally, we did not discuss this with our colleagues," Bill told an interviewer. "None of our professional associates were aware that this was going on."

   "Scribing the first book—the "Text"—a fascinating, dense, theoretical laying out of Course principles, took Helen nearly three years. She thought she was done, but after several months passed, she told Bill that she felt a "Workbook" was coming. Over the next few years, she took down this second volume, more prosaic in tone and divided into 365 short chapters, with a lesson or activity for each day, designed to train a person in seeing reality the way the Course lays out. (I find the Workbook rather trite in comparison with the Text....)"

   Bill adds "she kept feeling that maybe she was losing her mind.

   "Yet despite her misgivings and self-described "periods of open rebellion," Helen continued to listen and write, while Bill, surprised by the hundreds of pages of spiritual wisdom streaming out of his colleague, was deeply moved. "I did regard this as the answer to my question that there must be another way."

   She "couldn't resist telling her friends" about it, and some were familiar. "But most others, after agreeably purchasing a copy or flipping through mine, told me they found it "unreadable. ...

   "I soon set up a meeting with its publisher, Tam Morgan, outside San Francisco at the Foundation for Inner Peace. ...

   "Tam had inherited the role of publisher from her mother, Judith Skutch Whitson. She and her second husband had founded the Foundation for ParaSensory Investigation in 1972, after Judith thought she detected psychic abilities in her young daughter, Tam. A few years later, Judith met Helen and Bill through a friend. ... Judith asked Helen if she could publish it. Helen was unsure. To be safe, she and Bill and Judith consulted the Voice, which gave its blessing.

   "The Skutches renamed their organization the Foundation for Inner Peace (Bill and Helen were uncomfortable with the word "parasensory") and began devoting themselves exclusively to the Course. ... (The publishers have done very little advertising.)

   "In the early Nineties, the book received a huge boost in popularity after being promoted on TV by Oprah. Today, A Course in Miracles is considered by some to be one of the most influential modern spiritual texts. ...

   "Tam was a teenager when she first met Helen.... She had some very strong judgments and belief systems that were extremely critical. My mother introduced her to so many people, and Helen was the queen. And she seemed to really like that, being treated as the queen."

   "But she didn't want to be worshipped for the book, Tam told me. "She had no desire to actually practice the Course. ...

   "When I asked Tam what the essence of the Course was, for her, she said it was about "changing your perceptions from fear to love," and even more, a very strange form of forgiveness. "It's not 'I forgive you for what you did.' It's 'I realize you never did anything.' That this"—reality—"is a dream." ...

   "Bill had a home in Fire Island and he had an extra room built for Helen and her husband. And yet, as she said to my mother, 'You know, I would have left my husband in a second.' But that wasn't Bill's proclivity. ... . She didn't talk to Louis about the Course. ...

   ""And remember," she told me. "Helen never called the Voice Jesus. She called it the Voice." I found this surprising, since nearly all Course materials say the Voice she channeled was that of Jesus of Nazareth....

   "I felt more confused than before, and even further from understanding how this book had actually been written. Then I discovered that an unedited version of the Course—which included excised sections of Helen's shorthand notes—had been taken and leaked on the internet...."

   This "so-called Urtext revealed that significant cuts had been made to the first five chapters. ... Helen's biographer used the analogy of an unused tap.... Helen's channel to Jesus was rusty, but eventually the text ran clear—no edits were needed. ...

   "I was excited to compare the two versions. ...

   "I found the differences quite significant. ...

   "One of my favorite sections of excised text is this one, in which Jesus helps Helen buy a winter coat:

   "The reason I direct everything that is unimportant is because it is no way to waste YOUR free will. . . . You have to remember to ask me to take charge of all minutiae....

   "Kenneth Wapnick, a close friend of Helen's and the author of her biography, Absence from Felicity, wrote about her shopping mania.... [W]here she would often buy shoes that didn't fit, "thereby necessitating yet another trip to exchange them." ...

   "This way of wasting time was, for Ken, indicative of Helen's use of shopping to defend against Jesus and the more important tasks He would have her do. Shopping was "a masterful defense, for it almost totally preoccupied Helen, succeeding in its purpose of keeping Jesus safely away from [her] attention."

   "When Jesus and Helen were in sync, however, and it was the time for fun again, Ken could see that "it meant a great deal to her that she experienced Jesus accompanying her as she shopped." ...

   "Ken first appeared on the scene in 1972, after Bill read an academic paper that Ken had published about the links between mysticism and schizophrenia. He was excited to have finally found a psychologist "who took the mystical experience seriously"....

   "[B]efore accepting the position, he'd had a spiritual awakening, and eventually he decided to leave the hospital and become a Trappist monk. (He had been raised Jewish.) After five months at two different monasteries in Israel, he found that he was still thinking about that meeting he'd had with Helen and Bill. ... He changed his path one last time and spent over a year helping Helen prepare the manuscript for publication. Later, he would become one of the book's most important teachers, even opening a Course learning center with his second wife. ...

   "Helen became a very different person when she was expressing the Course or listening." ...

   "One excised passage acknowledges that "Bill is more prone to irritation, while you [Helen] are more vulnerable to rage."

   The "Voice" encouraged her: "Tell [Bill] that homo sex is sinful only to the extent it is based on the principle of exclusion. Everybody should love everybody. ...

   "I began to wonder if the Course was partly a way for Helen to talk to Bill about her feelings "through" a Voice she didn't have to claim. ...

   "I wondered if it was possible that Helen felt happier when she was working on the book because it meant spending more time with Bill. Could that have been why, a few months after declaring the Text to be the completed transmission, she announced that a second volume was coming?

   "Maybe the project, all along, had primarily been a way of creating a special bond between her and Bill.... Was Helen channeling everything she knew as a psychologist and a woman into this book to help her beloved Bill, and to gratify herself with his nearness? ...

   "I felt it would be pretty easy to call forth an endless stream of poetic jib-jab if it helped you keep the man you loved close. Even I could do that!

   "At this point in my research, the stories Ken told in his biography of Helen started to seem more suspect. ...

   "I remembered a detail I had come across. Apparently [Bill] had been employed briefly by the CIA, a fact that most Course devotees were either unaware of or downplayed.

   "As I dug deeper, strange patterns began to emerge. I discovered that, from early in his career, Bill often ended up in positions of influence without the necessary qualifications.... I began to wonder if any of his unlikely promotions had been CIA machinations. Bill worked as a TA for the famed midcentury psychologist Carl Rogers at the University of Chicago in the mid-Forties. Rogers later regretfully acknowledged that he'd taken CIA money. Had they also required him to hire as a TA their promising young operative, William Thetford? ...

   "I read through agency files that revealed that Bill had worked on Project Bluebird (which morphed into Project Artichoke, and then into Project MK-Ultra). Their main purpose—as Americans eventually came to know—was "devising scientific methods for controlling the minds of individuals," including through the use of drugs and hypnosis, often without a subject's consent.

   "Bill also worked with the CIA's John Gittinger on a psychological assessment model called the Personality Assessment System (PAS), which was designed to predict an individual's behavior with extraordinary accuracy. ... Bill later said he believed that Gittinger "had designed the most powerful descriptive and predictive system in the world for assessing personality," and ranked it up there "with the discoveries of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung."

   Bill "continued to work on the PAS for the rest of his career. "This made me somewhat uncomfortable, since it was still a CIA-supported endeavor," he acknowledged. ...

   "Helen also spent much of her career working on the PAS, and the two of them co-authored and presented several papers on the system during the same years they were scribing the Course.

   "One key theme of the Course corresponds neatly with an argument made in a 1957 article titled "Studies in Human Ecology," which was published in the American Journal of Psychiatry and authored by fifteen people, including Gittinger and Bill: that illness, whatever its nature, is fundamentally psychosomatic. Similarly, the Course's concluding section, "Manual for Teachers," states that "sickness is an election; a decision. It is the choice of weakness, in the mistaken conviction that it is strength."

   "This actually became the Course's most contentious principle—especially controversial when the book was being preached to gay men dying of AIDS in the Eighties by one of the Course's greatest popularizers, Marianne Williamson.

   "If one reads Helen's scientific publications, another overlap begins to emerge: between the early work she did as a psychologist and the material she "scribed."Her obsessions, her favored technical vocabulary, are everywhere in the Coursepages. ...

   "In her book The Cultural Cold War, Frances Stonor Saunders writes that: The individuals and institutions subsidized by the CIA were expected to perform as part of a broad campaign of persuasion, of a propaganda war in which "propaganda" was defined as "any organized effort or movement to disseminate information or a particular doctrine by means of news, special arguments or appeals designed to influence the thoughts and actions in any given group." ...

   "Had Bill been tasked by the CIA with producing a new Bible? One that would influence the direction people moved in, for reasons they would take to be their own? A text that would speak to Americans on the periphery of religious belonging and steer them toward a new kind of American religion—one without sin, established authority, or compulsory collective rituals, offering merely an array of techniques to practice detachment from reality?" She describes how this conviction continued to develop.

   "An interviewer once said to Bill, "It's interesting that you often use the word 'assignment' with regard to your and Helen's involvement with the Course. Why?" Bill said, "Well, the events we experienced leading up to the Course's dictation seemed to us to be a preparation for an assignment that somehow, somewhere, we had agreed to do together." He was implying that it was an assignment from God. But was this wording a sly joke with himself; did he really mean an assignment.... Bill told the same interviewer. "One confirmation of this is that when we completed the manuscript, we were both awarded tenure as professors." Is this likely, given how distracted they would have been working on a 1,300-page transmission from Jesus Christ? Or did they receive their promotions as recognition for the completion of their "assignment"?

   "Strange, too, is that, right after receiving these most desired promotions, they both left Columbia, retired from the medical field altogether, and never again worked at universities. Bill fled for a life of leisure on the West Coast. This was in 1976, right around when Gerald Ford was instructing the Rockefeller Commission to investigate the CIA's activities in the United States. ...

   "That year, Congress heard testimony from that great supporter of the PAS, Sidney Gottlieb, who admitted that the purpose of MK-Ultra had been to investigate "whether and how it was possible to modify an individual's behavior by covert means." He also admitted he was protecting "prominent scientists, researchers, and physicians" who had collaborated with the CIA. Little more about the program can be known for sure, though, because an earlier CIA director, Richard Helms, had ordered a document purge in 1973, and almost all the papers relating to MK-Ultra were destroyed.

   "One detail started to shine out through all my research, adding to my troubled thoughts: during the years that Bill and Helen were working at the Columbia Medical Center, America's most famous practitioner of therapeutic hypnosis, Herbert Spiegel, was also present, teaching a popular postgraduate course on the art of hypnosis, which frequently drew crowds of curious physicians. ...

   "I remembered an interview in which Helen said, "Where did the writing come from? Certainly the subject matter itself was the last thing I would have expected to write about."

   "Did Helen write the book while in a trance? On the one hand, this is amazing to consider. On the other, it's related to something most artists do, which is gradually tunnel deeper into a state of hyperfocus and ability, arriving at what is often called a state of "flow." ...

   "Reading through Course message boards online, I began to see that I was not the only one who experienced the book as having a hypnotic, trancelike power. ...

   "During the years that Bill and Helen were working on the Course, the CIA was excited about the potential of LSD. Operatives frequently took it themselves, and even covertly dosed one another. ...

   "Perhaps Helen had also been dosed with LSD. Had Bill tripped once too often? ...

   "A former student of Helen's at Columbia, Benedict Groeschel, who was a Catholic priest, once said that Bill was "probably the most sinister person I ever met," though he refused to say more. ...

   "I began to wonder how likely it was that anyone could successfully carry out an operation such as this one: to create and sell—in the millions!—a mind-control Bible. Even publishing houses, and it was their business, were unable to reliably manufacture bestsellers. To believe the CIA had this wild idea, and that it worked, surely represented an unwarranted faith in the agency's control and power.

   "Finally, my worst suspicions fell away, and I was nearly back to where I started. ...

   "In the final weeks of her life, Helen told Groeschel, who remained a close friend, that her mother had, for a time, been a Christian Scientist. (Bill's parents had been, too.) ...Yet, Randall Sullivan wrote, <www.tinyurl.com/438h96ah> what affected Groeschel most was "the "black hole of rage and depression that Schucman fell into during the last two years of her life." . . . She had become frightening to be with . . . spewing psychotic hatred not only for A Course in Miracles but "for all things spiritual." When he sat at Schucman's bedside as she lay dying, "she cursed, in the coarsest barroom language you could imagine, 'that book, that goddamn book.' She said it was the worst thing that ever happened to her. ...

   "Back at the Schucman home, in the early hours of the morning, returning one last time from the hospital, Louis asked Ken to remove all the copies of A Course in Miracles from the apartment. He wanted them gone that very night. He also said he didn't want any mention of the Course in Ken's eulogy. ...

   "Groeschel's words were grimmer. He reflected after her death that "this woman who had written so eloquently that suffering really did not exist spent the last two years of her life in the blackest psychotic depression I have ever witnessed." ...

   "When friends asked me what I believed in the end, I didn't know what to say. ... To try to make up my mind about people who had not been seriously studied, whom I had never met, who had a seemingly bottomless list of reasons to lie to each other and themselves, was impossible."

   Heti concludes: "It seemed that in my confused, eager pursuit of the truth, I had done what Helen did, what Bill did, what every single one of us does, from birth until our dying: I had passionately distracted myself. ... It was just this free and frustrating intermingling of everything all at once—poetry and politics, the real gods and the fake ones, all our most loving actions and all our most deceitful ones. It was all mixed up, like a pile of clothes in the corner of the room. The clothes that Jesus helped us pick out, and the ones we bought on our own." Lengthy.  ("The New Age Bible" still seems to fit.) <www.tinyurl.com/avp9pu4f>

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