This material and other channeled works

For ten years this library has taught a material in a confident register, and in all that time it has never once put the corpus next to another one to say anything about either. I defended the omission as respect for other people’s revelations. Looking back, that was not respect. It was the coward’s version of a comparison, the kind that only produces the result the speaker already liked, because it never lets the two things stand close enough for a seam to show.

So here it is, argued at the only level where a comparison can be honest. Not sanctity, which is not an argument, and over which this community has no standing to adjudicate. Claims and conditions instead: what a corpus says it is, who carried it, how it was transmitted, and what it does when it gets something wrong. Those four can be shown to you, and I am content to be shown them.

You may have arrived here out of one of the others, and if so you are holding the question this essay exists to answer. Is this a replacement for what you had? It is not, and I will not argue that it stands above the tradition you came out of. What I will do instead is separate what here is checkable, what nobody can check, and what you ought to look for before you carry any of it across.

What the transcripts settle

The archive this library reads holds 106 sessions, numbered, with 2,632 records in them. The first record is 1.0 and the last is 106.23, and there is no session 107. That is not an interpretation of the material. It is the shape of the object, and a reader may check it without anybody’s permission.

Before any of that, one passage shows what makes the rest worth counting. Asked about the nature of mind, the material weighs the act of speaking against the reader’s freedom.

The nature of mind is something which we have requested that you ponder. However, it is, shall we say, clear enough to the casual observer that we may share some thoughts with you without infringing upon your free learn/teaching experiences. The nature of the unconscious is of the nature of concept rather than word. Consequently, before the veiling the use of the deeper mind was that of the use of unspoken concept.

Nobody prompted it to do that arithmetic. A corpus that checks itself against the free will it claims to serve is a different sort of text from one that assumes the question settled in its favour.

Then the refusals, which are the second checkable feature. The word infringement carries 34 of the 2,632 records, and in nearly all of them the material is marking a limit on itself. It will not read a person’s programming because that would be an infringement, and it says so unprompted. It will not sequence the questions, or teach in place of the seeker.

I will not suggest the proper series of questions. This is your prerogative as free agent of the Law of One having learn/understood that our social memory complex cannot effectually discern the distortions of the societal mind/body/spirit complex of your peoples.

That last sentence is usually quoted as unusual modesty. The blindness in it belongs to any messenger in that position, not to this one: it is the common condition of the genre rather than a distinguishing mark, which is why this comparison has to be made on the countable things.

There are more, and they are the ones I did not go looking for. Four records declare an error in the transmission rather than let it stand, and one goes further: asked whether it was aware of errors, the answer is that it is unaware of them and welcomes the asker’s perceptions in correcting them. Three more records in which it says it may have misperceived the query and asks the questioner to begin again. A corpus that can be caught being wrong, and says so, is a corpus you can work on.

The one question nobody can check

Now the part that has to be said without embarrassment, because the rest of this essay is worth nothing without it.

The material’s account of itself was produced from inside the contact, by the thing whose reliability is in question, in a form that thing chose, and it reaches you through readers, publishers and readers again. You hold no instrument standing outside that contact to check it against. Scepticism is no escape from this. To dismiss the account requires treating the self-report as false, which is still treating the self-report as evidence, only in the negative. There is no position here that gets you underneath it.

What follows is not that the account is false, and not that studying it is an error. It is narrower and stranger: you can work on this material for forty years and never resolve where it came from, and that is not a defect in the reading. It is the truth about the reading.

The corpus says as much itself, in its own hedged way, when it states the thing it exists to state.

The Law of One, though beyond the limitations of name, as you call vibratory sound complexes, may be approximated by stating that all things are one, that there is no polarity, no right or wrong, no disharmony, but only identity.

An instrument that reports its central claim as an approximation is telling you what kind of object you are holding.

And when it is asked directly what would help most, the answer is not more material.

You must realize that we offered these concepts to you so that you might grow in your own knowledge of the self through the consideration of them. We would prefer, especially for this latter query, to listen to the observations upon this subject which the student of these exercises may make and then suggest further avenues of the refinement of these inquiries. We feel we might be of more aid in this way.

Read the closing clause: second voice, not first. That is the source recommending your own observations over its own, which is what use rather than belief means in practice.

Figure 01

What the transcripts settle, and the one thing they cannot

What other corpora actually look like

None of that is a comparison until something stands on the other side, and the honest move is to name the corpora rather than gesture at the phrase. Everything in this section is sourced scholarship and those bodies’ own accounts. None of it is this community’s judgement about what any of them believes.

A Course in Miracles is the case where the archive is best documented, and the documentation is the interesting part. Its own historians set out at least five scribal versions, an original transcript that has never surfaced, and editing at every copying stage; Doug Thompson’s reconstruction of the version family concludes that for this text there is, in a very real way, no finished product. More telling is the Foundation for Inner Peace’s own account of the scribing, in which Kenneth Wapnick states that the entity does not speak words, that the content is the entity’s while the form is supplied by the minds that wrote it down, and that the form of the text is the scribe’s. None of that makes the Course false. It makes its transmission contested and documented, the opposite condition from one you can check a page reference in.

The Edgar Cayce readings are shaped differently again: several thousand named recipients, each with a personal question, indexed by reading number, with a foundation chartered in 1948 as legal owner and custodian and a written reference policy on who may be named. That is a continuing institution with an archive, not a closed span.

The Monroe material is not an entity at all. Robert Monroe published accounts of his own experiences under his own name across three books between 1971 and 1994, the institute he founded is still running, and he worked with Charles Tart on target-reading tests, which is a documented attempt at a controlled check rather than a claim to have passed one.

Every difference there is a difference in the conditions of transmission, and that is the whole of what a comparison can establish. The rest should be said plainly: none is ranked above another here, and each is followed by people for whom it works. I have no instrument for that judgement and neither do you, so any library that supplies one is selling.

What to check before you carry anything across

Five questions, identical for any body of revelation, this one included. Does it declare its own errors and name a mechanism? This corpus does, four times, and the mechanism is a woman’s body under strain. A body of revelation that has never been wrong in writing is not a revelation, it is a brochure.

Is it still running, and who carries it?

Do not concern yourselves overly with this in the space/time nexus present, but do not allow these distortions to remain over a long period or the contact will be gradually impaired.

The essay on why the material stopped argues that a lifespan named in advance is not the same event as one that ran out. The Course and the Virginia Beach readings are both still moving. This corpus is not, and its refusal to hand over a method is a fact about a closed channel rather than a moral achievement.

Does it ask you to question it, or to comply? Are its texts fixed, or still in revision? And does anything in it claim to be the only channel?

Run those five here. It passes four and the fifth only in part, and I will not call a partial pass a pass. The material does not say it is the only channel, and it would be wrong if it did: it places its own teachers inside a wider group that includes others, some of whom speak through relays rather than instruments, which it says plainly in session 60. What it does claim is the Law, and that is a claim about a thing rather than about a channel.

One instruction in the corpus fits this essay better than anything I have written, and it was given for a different reason.

It is well to investigate each discipline, not as a dilettante, but as one who seeks the touchstone, one who wishes to feel the pull of the magnet.

Read it as a method, not as advice about disciplines. If you go looking for the touchstone of each, and refuse to sample, then the comparison this essay has been making is the one the material itself asks for. Bring the corpus you came from and set it beside this one at the level of claims and conditions, which is the only level on which a comparison is worth anything.

The sentence I am signing

I have been asked, in effect, whether forty years of study can end in not knowing. It can. That is the point rather than the failure, and a library that can hold a thing without believing it or dismissing it has done something rarer than either.

Use the material. Do not resolve it.