Editor's note: This transcript has been lightly edited to bring clarification to certain points of the dialogue and for easier readability. For this reason, it does not match the corresponding audio mp3 word-for-word. However, the overall content and the expressed ideas remain unchanged.
Participant 1: Well, I have a question. You keep saying "He says," and so forth. Is the Text supposed to be Christ’s words?
Speaker: The entire Course is… seems to be written in first person where He says 'you' and 'I'… uses pronouns like 'I' first person and makes references to Himself in the Text about the crucifixion, about the resurrection, about the apostles...
Participant 1: Alright now, if I'm not mistaken a woman and her husband wrote this?
Speaker: No there was a woman who's described as the “scribe” who took it down and she...
Participant 1: So this is channeled?
Speaker: You could say that. It's different than a lot of things, like sometimes channeled writing or automated writing or automatic writing and so on and so forth… This woman received a very clear inner dictation and she took it down short hand. And then her collaborator wasn't her husband but actually the professor that hired her at Columbia [Presbyterian Medical Center]. He would assure her and calm her down with one hand, he said, and type with the other and over the process of seven years [they] took it down.
And again for me, I have studied so many different paths and spiritualities and everything… When I first picked it up in California I had no idea who wrote it, I knew nothing about it, I just picked it up and started reading the ideas and it was some time before I even happened to get to some of those passages that were speaking in first person about the crucifixion and the resurrection. All I knew was, the resonance inside me that I was gauging everything that I would read in philosophy and religion and everything else that I felt was guiding me towards wholeness regardless of Jesus or Christianity or anything, that was really strong. Very, very strong. And then when I found out about it, it was kind of like, 'Oh well [Laughs] who wrote this book?' Well I had a sense of it.
Also you could say though on another level that that's symbolic, because Jesus in here is saying that there is a whole mind… there is a mind that's awake and this is coming... this is kind of coming from that whole mind. [And] Jesus says He was just the first to awaken, implying that there have been others and so that it's not person-specific and so people who are identified as Jewish or identified as Buddhist or whatever… when I talk to them I’d say well you don't like the word Jesus or Holy Spirit or [inaudible] you don't have to think that it's a literal Christian path just because it's using Christian terminology. So I just see it as ideas; as a metaphorical ladder that's coming from a whole mind.
Participant 2: It talks about Jesus… I guess
the way I came to understand it was that Jesus was the person in history
who had this experience and this... it's been written in the Bible and
on and on. But there's also the Christ Mind that he was identified with
and that's the Christ Mind that's in everyone and He just chose to identify
completely with that and that was His transformation or His Awakening…
when He totally identified with that Christ Mind and came from that
place, that's what He taught. Jesus was the person who walked around
and taught that, but it was the Christ Mind coming through and it’s
the Christ Mind in any of us that will come through when we tap into
it, when we align with that; will come through anyone - it's not person
specific, it's just the Christ.
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