Updated: 17 March 2025
MASTER
INDEX of articles written, posted online or recommended
by Alex Paterson
Alex Paterson (March 2025)
Original link (now dead) http://www.avaiya.com/2013/03/ken-wapnick-on-dissuading-people-from-doing-the-course/
Hi, I’m AVAIYA Founder, Ike Allen.
While spending time with Ken
Wapnick to create A Course in Miracles The Movie, Leap! The Movie , the A Course in
Miracles Awakening Series & the book, 45 Days With
Kenneth Wapnick, I asked him several wonderful
questions, including the story that Helen said The Course was only for a few
people.
Below is the response Ken shared
with me:
"One of the things Helen (Schucman)
used to say about the Course, is that it’s only for about five or six people.
There was a period of time when she actually counted who she thought the five
or six people were. I’m not going to give you the names. At some point, I think
it was in a weak moment, she expanded it to nine or ten. But the point of that
is not to take it as literally true, but as a symbol for the fact that this
Course, in its pure form, in what it’s really teaching, is for relatively few,
because it’s so frightening.
It threatens the very fabric of
our existence. It threatens the greatest value of all, which is the value of
our personal self. So while I quote Helen’s line rather often, about the five
or six people, and sometimes we even say, half jokingly, that I try to dissuade
people from the Course, it’s really a way of saying that this is much more
serious than you think. This is a much more serious thought system than you
think. This has a depth far greater than you believe. And that in a sense, I’m
kind of warning them that if you continue with this, you’re going to lose
everything, at least everything that you hold dear.
There’s a wonderful line saying
that when you cross over to the real world, which is the Course’s symbol for
the end of the journey, you will realize “in glad astonishment that for all this,
you gave up nothing.” But on this side of the bridge, we’re giving up
everything. We’re giving up not only what we cherish and what we love, but
we’re giving up our very self. So that’s why the process is really a very
gentle one in which we don’t transcend the Ego until the very end, but we
transform our self. We transform ourselves from an angry, judgmental, guilty,
fearful, anxious person to someone who is now more loving, more gentle, more
kind and more peaceful.
So there’s a gentle kind of transition,
but at the very end, the whole thing dissolves into its own nothingness. So I
like to caution people, at least alert people, to take this Course much more
seriously than they may otherwise do; and to really have enough humility and
enough respect for the Course to see oneself as spending a lifetime growing
into it, rather than being tempted to scale it down to our size, but to see our
lives as growing into it. Because this is a thought system that literally
reaches to Heaven, even though it meets us in this world, in the illusion – but
its ultimate goal is to awaken us from the dream and return us home."
'Absence From Felicity' by Kenneth Wapnick 'A Course in Miracles' scribed by Helen Schucman 'The Disappearance of the Universe' by Gary Renard 'A Souls Journey' by Peter Richelieu 'The Cosmic Game' by Stanislav Grof 'A New Earth' by Eckhart Tolle 'The Big Book of Near Death Experiences' by P.M.H. Atwater MASTER
INDEX of articles written, posted
online or recommended by Alex Paterson
Copyright © Alex Paterson 1999
Alex PATERSON is an Australian citizen by birth. He writes articles and advises on issues pertaining to aviation, politics, sociology, the environment, sustainable farming, history, computers, natural health therapies, esoteric teachings and spirituality.
He can be contacted at:
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