Jon’s explanations feel very much to me like the awareness practice of Buddhism translated into western lingo. There is the concept of no self, our conditioned habitual awareness, being a form of mechanized impulses, which he calls “the dream“ of consciousness. The goal of human life is to use your body as an instrument to wake up from the state of non-awareness. The sin and forgiveness dynamic of traditional Christianity via the substitutionary atonement is the cosmic mythologization of personal and social errors made by human beings. We do wrong things not because we are sinners, but because we lack the knowledge of awareness. The insane society that he talks about is because people are always trying to make themselves guiltless, when what we ought to be doing, is making ourselves aware of the compassionate interconnectedness of us all. There is a lot here he talks about which resonates with how the mind and brain structure out perceptions of reality, are habituated in certain ways to programmatically decipher our relational experiences in non-present ways, and to desire that things go a certain way. As Jesus said though, the key is to see things clearly, and to do this you have to take the fortress out of your own eye. At a higher system, level of the interaction of religions, the course in miracles feels to me like something that had to happen in order to respond to the deficiencies of modern Christianity. I would argue that they’re really isn’t much wrong with intellectual infrastructure of traditional Christianity, but at the problem is it was made binding on all eternity, so that eventually friction emerges when words and concepts designed for ancient cultures don’t get translated properly into modern semantics and evolved meanings of consciousness itself, congruent with the scientific knowledge of our current epoch. if Jesus himself were here right now, which traditional Christianity claims is actually the case, then I think he would likely throw out half of the Bible’s text and say, using the language and thought forms of the current era, “this is what I really mean “. I can easily imagine him, saying, “you must be born again“which means, “imagine a different way of conceiving the reality being presented to you in your own mind. “
Jon’s explanations feel very much to me like the awareness practice of Buddhism translated into western lingo. There is the concept of no self, our conditioned habitual awareness, being a form of mechanized impulses, which he calls “the dream“ of consciousness. The goal of human life is to use your body as an instrument to wake up from the state of non-awareness. The sin and forgiveness dynamic of traditional Christianity via the substitutionary atonement is the cosmic mythologization of personal and social errors made by human beings. We do wrong things not because we are sinners, but because we lack the knowledge of awareness. The insane society that he talks about is because people are always trying to make themselves guiltless, when what we ought to be doing, is making ourselves aware of the compassionate interconnectedness of us all. There is a lot here he talks about which resonates with how the mind and brain structure out perceptions of reality, are habituated in certain ways to programmatically decipher our relational experiences in non-present ways, and to desire that things go a certain way. As Jesus said though, the key is to see things clearly, and to do this you have to take the fortress out of your own eye. At a higher system, level of the interaction of religions, the course in miracles feels to me like something that had to happen in order to respond to the deficiencies of modern Christianity. I would argue that they’re really isn’t much wrong with intellectual infrastructure of traditional Christianity, but at the problem is it was made binding on all eternity, so that eventually friction emerges when words and concepts designed for ancient cultures don’t get translated properly into modern semantics and evolved meanings of consciousness itself, congruent with the scientific knowledge of our current epoch. if Jesus himself were here right now, which traditional Christianity claims is actually the case, then I think he would likely throw out half of the Bible’s text and say, using the language and thought forms of the current era, “this is what I really mean “. I can easily imagine him, saying, “you must be born again“which means, “imagine a different way of conceiving the reality being presented to you in your own mind. “