I recently finished reading the autobiographies of the two people who acted as scribes for A Course In Miracles, Helen Shucman, PhD. and William Thetford, Ph.D. Helen’s visions and the possibility of prior lives that they may have shared, gives me reason to reflect on the relationship they had here, especially in what is recorded in the last few years of Helen’s life for both of them.(http://shop.acim.org/products/helen-schucman-autobiography and http://shop.acim.org/products/thetford-life-story )
Yes, I do accept the idea that re-incarnation is a possibility, but I also believe that these lives are not truly life and that they are more like dreams that seem like they are linear, but are really all happening simultaneously. I know it is not a typical LDS/Mormon teaching, but I am open to the possibility. I have always had an open mind about reality, meaning I knew there were things beyond our senses that were true. Throughout my life I have been willing to accept that this is our life, personal events, especially this past decade, have challenged everything I based that on.
I have experienced enough of life, pain, and everybody’s idea of what is going on, to be willing to go inside and find out what I believe.
I believe in God and His Son and His love for us. I believe in the family organization of humanity. I believe that this is the form of organization that our Heavenly Father, who is the originator of all that is, would want us to have. Yes, that means that I believe in a man and a woman head up the family as a single unit. I believe that the Creator and His Son have female counterparts that are equal in their strength, power, and benevolence.
I started this blog to teach of the truths that Jesus Christ professed and to show that He has taught us what we need to reach our potential. I also believe there are many ways to come to God; His teachings are unsurpassed in my opinion and have the most direct course and greatest hope of receiving the greatest extent of our potential. He is the example that I follow, ponder, admire, and desire to emulate.
I have always been interested in the relationship between a man and a woman since forever and I plan on working on this issue till I die and then some no doubt. I have spent the last 8 years solo, but that does not mean that I have not had plenty of encounters to add to my research materials.
Okay, back to the two on my mind tonight, Helen and Bill. In various ways they obviously have agreed to work out the concept of loyalty and commitment. From the first, linearly anyway, as the priestess who lived in a community that believed that her power come through the red stone that was in her crown. If stolen, the only way her power could be restored was to take the life of the thief, which she refused to do and condemned herself to die. That is a story of human compassion and personal integrity, as well as symbolic of the challenge he presented to her throughout time, from what I can tell. Even in this incarnation they played a similar role as he sought to persuade her into the spirituality realm instead of honoring her and her own cognoscente inner voice. He never quite caught the spirit of the work from what I can tell and seemed a bit put off when Ken Wapnick stepped in to fill that role in bringing forth the work they had. It is almost like he was her perpetual “thorn in the side”, yet she honored him and a commitment that spanned over several lifetimes. Not many of us get to have awareness of the ties that bind us to certain individuals who come into our lives.
What strikes me powerfully in that first incarnation she spoke of is her attitude and thoughts as she is stripped of her priestess robes and set outside the gates of the city to face the desert and her death. She said she was angry with herself for having spared the life of a thief and giving up her own. The real sorrow in this is that she did not receive the gift that she had given herself, which was to give up her life for another, by being angry about it and not recognizing the joy in it and the falsity that this life is. Something tells me that she probably struggled in that same way during this lifetime.
I want to say that Helen says she puts no interpretation to her visions or dreams but was only relaying what she had experienced, so the interpretation that they are other lives that they shared is mine, as are the opinions expressed about them here.
Then there was the one incarnation where she was a female, light skinned slave who bought her freedom by walking away from her husband (causing him difficulties she did not define) and who “trusted her without good reason”. According to Helen’s words she used sexual favors to trade with white man for her freedom. Trust was the issue here again. Isn’t that what is essential in a relationship, the glue that holds two people together? Was it his trust in her temporal relationship with him that was put to the test or was it her trust in herself to see to her own survival? Does one truly supersede the other? At first glance, it seems a matter of betrayal, but I am not so sure.
We are taught in the scriptures that the greatest thing that man can do is lay down his life for another. We are also taught to love the other as ourselves. I have struggled with this concept throughout my Christian walk as a survivor of childhood abuses. Is another person’s survival of greater value than mine? Do it unto others you have done it unto me. I am a child of God. Am I not just as valuable as another life form? Is it an extension of the theme of consuming guilt of the ego in ACIM taken on not only for the separation from God but for the destruction of the other over the self? The concept appears much deeper than I first supposed.
One might ask, “When someone breaks trust does that mean that there is true separation in the family of man”? I suggest that it is not so, even with the evidence laid out to suggest it. We have been taught what God has joined together let not man put asunder. I suggest that it simply could never be even though man has a gazillion ways to make it appear otherwise. I believe that mankind has the ability to create the illusion that separation has occurred with others, just as he created the illusion that he had separated from God. God’s understanding and God’s truth are not man’s.
In this incarnation and others it seems Helen and Bill ran the gambit of what a relationship could tolerate or do to itself. Even in this lifetime she accepted the employment position with the inner witness that she would save him in accepting it, supposedly by helping him put the psychiatric department in order under his direction. Even though not spiritually inclined, she trusted an inner message.
It is interesting to me that in this life she did not give credence to spiritual things even though she was obviously an example of just that in the channeling of Jesus to receive A Course In Miracles. I suspect that has more to do with her inability to accept the world’s or society’s interpretation, specifically the terminology given her academic inclination, of spirituality from either the direction of spiritualists in her day (mainly 1930-1970’s) or Christianity’s. When man seeks to organize a way of life, he puts definitions and interpretations on even the most simple and true principles, and in so doing can distort the divine interpretation.
Bill was the one capable of accepting the spiritual or at least psychic side of the experience, but, from what I know at this time not having yet read Ken’s recording of her history, it was Ken Wapnick that would have the Biblical background to be able to resonate with what Helen felt about A Course In Miracles. I also get the feeling from Bill’s recordings is that he had a deep love for Helen that came a shade close to possessiveness and it was not put to rest before her death. I note this due to the statement that he chose not to see her the last year of her life though they spoke on the phone nearly daily.
From page 41 of Bill’s autobiography: “I wasn’t that fond of Helen, but there was a deep love that continued in spite of everything. It had nothing to do with anything. It seemed to represent our joining in union and cooperation. We tried to do something that transcended our egos. That was the thing that seemed real, the only thing that seemed to really persist. Once having done that there was no breaking away from it. It was a commitment that went on forever. If love is eternal, when you make that kind of commitment, you have made it. It doesn’t have anything to do with the usual things about commitments. It all seemed so confusing at times. Love and hate, patience and disaster, everything was all jumbled up.” I mean come on, if that is not a description of my relationships (and I am talking about marriages) I do not know what is!
I sense that his ego enjoyed the 7 years they spent preparing the work and my womanly intuition feels that he reveled in their discoveries and their intimacy on an intellectual, emotional, and spiritual level. It was one that she did not share with her husband, as his interest in ACIM did not really happen till after her death. In my walk on earth as pertains to men, I have come to believe that a serious relationship with a man does not need to be physical to have the qualities that I value in what I call an eternal relationship, meaning marriage. It is no wonder this bonding would have occurred, considering the obvious exclusivity they must have had because of the power of the new information in the work they were bringing forth. At the least, they had a terrific sense of united purpose in this work and it took significant stamina and commitment with all the obstacles including their work load and other obligations.
Her childhood also, seemed to prepare her for a more casual relationship with her husband; the way that she was taken care of on personal level by a governess rather than her mother, as well as her father’s austere and non-personal demeanor. This would have made room for the more passionate or emotional intensity to be found in the world of her career.
Does it not stand to reason that the healthy and real relationship (called Holy Instant in ACIM) would need a mental decision to serve the true and higher self come what may and at any cost? I believe these two people had this in so many ways.
They may not have understood the significance of their personal relationship or the power of it as an example of what their life’s work would help us to reach, and yet, I do believe they had an inkling. This relationship may well be one of the more powerful in showing me what the order of mankind is to be before the world. And the journey continues for self discovery, forgiveness, and unity with the children of men who have forgotten they are children of God foremost.
Till next time,
Have courage and remember that love conquers fear every time; we do not have to waste our energies with the former. It is our choice. Thank you Heavenly Father for that truth, in Jesus name, amen.
Namaste
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