Higher
Learning:
An
Interview with
Kenneth and Gloria Wapnick
by
D.
Patrick Miller
Published by D. Patrick Miller at Smashwords
© 2010 by D. Patrick Miller
Smashwords Edition
All Rights Reserved
Smashwords Edition, License Notice
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords and purchase your own copy. Thank for respecting the hard work of this author.
MIRACLE ESSAYS
#5
Originally
published in THE SUN, March 1995 and excerpted in
Understanding
A Course in Miracles
by D. Patrick Miller (Celestial Arts/
Random House, 2008). The
introduction has been updated where
necessary for current factual
accuracy.
A PECULIAR thing happened to Kenneth Wapnick on the way to the monastery: he encountered a massive, mystical manuscript that changed the direction of his life. This manuscript was published as A Course in Miracles (ACIM) in 1976, and in the years since it has changed the lives of countless others as well. With two million copies in print in English and eighteen translations across the world, the growing influence of the Course appears assured.
The Course is a spiritual self-study curriculum in three parts: a lengthy “Text,” a “Workbook for Students” offering 365 daily lessons, and a brief “Manual for Teachers.” The Course was written down in shorthand over a period of seven years by Columbia University research psychologist Helen Schucman, who claimed to hear a “soundless voice” giving her “inner dictation.” She read her notes to a colleague, Columbia’s psychiatry department chair Dr. William N. Thetford, who typed them up. The two of them kept their work a secret until its completion in 1972.
Schucman, who died in 1981, never claimed authorship of the Course or attempted to capitalize on its growing popularity. By all accounts a difficult and contradictory person, Schucman was fiercely protective of the Course in her last years, but she never quite accepted its transformative message herself. Near the end of her life, she told a friend, “I know the Course is true, but I don’t believe it.”
One of the things about ACIM that made Schucman uncomfortable – and that many others find difficult to believe – was the apparent identity of the soundless voice that dictated the material. At a number of points that voice clearly identifies itself as Jesus Christ. For example: “I raised the dead by knowing that life is an eternal attribute of everything that the living God created.” And this remarkable passage:
If the Apostles had not felt guilty, they never could have quoted me as saying, “I come not to bring peace but a sword.” This is clearly the opposite of everything I taught. Nor could they have described my reactions to Judas as they did, if they had really understood me. I could not have said, “Betrayest thou the Son of Man with a kiss!” unless I believed in betrayal. The whole message of the crucifixion was simply that I did not. ... As you read the teachings of the Apostles, remember that I told them myself that there was much they would understand later, because they were not wholly ready to follow me at the time.
The Workbook section of the Course encourages surrender of the ego through constant forgiveness of personal grievances. The Text insists on a complete reversal of ordinary perception, urging that we come to consider spirit as reality and the physical world as illusion. “This course,” says the Introduction, “can ... be summed up very simply in this way: Nothing real can be threatened. Nothing unreal exists. Herein lies the peace of God.” The frequent references to the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit establish a Christian tone while the metaphysics of the Course suggest Gnostic, Kabbalistic, and Eastern mysticisms. As the Course frequently reinterprets basic tenets of contemporary Christian belief, it presents an unmistakable challenge to Western religious traditions.
Although not yet a subject of analysis in academic or theological circles, the Course has acquired a considerable following, and some of its principles have found their way into such popular nonfiction works as Gerald Jampolsky’s Love Is Letting Go of Fear and Goodbye to Guilt, Marianne Williamson’s A Return to Love, and the various works of Wayne Dyer and Iyanla Vanzant.
The Course also has its share of critics, including Christian evangelicals who decry it as a satanic deception and mention it in their roundups of New Age material that their followers should shun. On the other side of the spectrum, archetypal psychologist James Hillman has said that he hates the Course and regards it as “Republican right-wing politics in the guise of spiritual reformation.” The controversy surrounding the Course is due at least in part to the fact that it is often mistaken for a moral philosophy — that is, advice on how to live — when in truth it is a mystical path, concerned not with daily conduct but with the inward transformation of consciousness. Because it asserts that the world we see is a perceptual error or “miscreation” of our minds, the Course is focused on changing students’ perceptions — through forgiveness, the release of guilt, and disidentification with the ego — rather than on directly promoting any moral code.
Kenneth Wapnick met Schucman and Thetford in 1972 and worked with Schucman for a year on editing the manuscript, making capitalization and punctuation consistent and adding subtitles to its original form.
Raised in a Jewish home and sent to a Hebrew school, Wapnick nevertheless thought of himself as an atheist by high school, recognizing only Mozart and Beethoven as his “spiritual teachers.” Still, for his doctoral thesis in psychology, Wapnick was drawn to study the mystic Saint Teresa of Avila, understanding “all her references to God and Jesus as metaphors for something else.” After his first marriage ended in 1970, Wapnick recognized that his life was becoming increasingly solitary and monastic, and he took to reading the works of Thomas Merton. This study led Wapnick to visit the Abbey of Gethsemane, where Merton had lived, and it was there that he decided his personal destiny was to become a monk.
Eventually, Wapnick was baptized as a Catholic, and he later visited two monasteries in Israel, choosing one in Jerusalem as the place where he would settle. Before going to Israel, however, Wapnick had been introduced to Schucman and Thetford by a mutual friend. Returning from Israel to tie up the last loose ends of his life in the United States, Wapnick sat down with Schucman to look at the stack of typed volumes that would later be known as A Course in Miracles and was, he says, “bowled over. I thought it was the most beautiful thing I’d read since Shakespeare, and that it really said something. It took only days for me to decide that this was what my life would be.”
Wapnick went on to found, with his second wife, Gloria, the nonprofit Foundation for A Course in Miracles (FACIM), which operates a teaching academy now located in Temecula, California. (There are countless study groups and several academies for Course studies, but there is no official central organization or leader promoting its teaching.) Through the foundation, Kenneth has published a number of books and audio tapes on Course principles, as well as a biography of Helen Schucman titled Absence from Felicity. I talked with Kenneth and Gloria on a warm summer evening in 1994 at their former retreat center near Roscoe, New York.
D. Patrick Miller: Did the transmission of the Course material through Helen Schucman always seem credible to you?