The Donations
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A bit of background on this project and a personal statement.
You don’t have to read all this in order to donate but if you’re interested in what we’re doing here and why we’re doing it, this may be of interest to you.
If one is a student of the Bible one can go to any of thousands of libraries around the world and find, quite literally, “access to everything.” You can get copies of all the known manuscript copies of the Bible, every version of the Bible ever produced, Concordances, “consensus texts” of the Greek and Hebrew manuscripts. In short, the full range of Primary Scholarship. You will also find a rich supply of secondary scholarship, including commentaries on every passage in the Bible so you can see what others have thought and debated and even resolved in the past. On that the student can build a informed understanding of the material. Not only can he get a copy of the base text, he can avail himself of the results of many thousands of scholarly careers which were often asking the same questions of the text he has in his mind. On these he can build a truly informed understanding of the material and various and sometimes contradictory interpretations of it.
When it comes to A Course in Miracles it is extremely difficult to even get an accurate copy of any of the original manuscripts. There is no library that I know of where all this material is brought together and when it comes to several key primary sources, I can’t get a copy for love or money.
Every scholar in any discipline which examines any kind of “textual evidence” is interested in “primary sources.” You will probably mostly work with “copies” but at some point those copies must be verified and authenticated as “accurate copies.” No secondary scholar wants to publish an essay interpreting a passage only to find the passage he’s quoted has a typo and was originally something different. No matter how “serious” or “minor” the typo, you want a correct copy if possible, not a mistaken copy. The credibility of any secondary scholarship or interpretation of any document is only as good as the accuracy of the primary source on which it is based. The task of Primary Scholarship is to provide Secondary Scholarship with the most accurate rendition of an historical document that is possible along with an accurate assessment of the reliability of that rendition. It is not always possible to be certain what an ambiguous passage says, but it is possible to be honest about reporting the uncertainty and it is possible to refrain from claiming more certainty than the evidence supports.
For ACIM the “primary sources” include at least the original Shorthand Notes Helen Schucman took down, the first typed copy made by Bill Thetford to Schucman’s oral dictation, and each of the “edited retypings” which were made along the way. A key importance of these is that close examination will quickly reveal that the copy of ACIM which was presented to the printer in 1975 includes thousands of copying mistakes. Now I haven’t personally counted them all, no one has. I haven’t even found them all. I don’t know of anyone who has. But I have found so many as to state there are “thousands.” I’m not even discussing modifications which were apparently intentional editing. I’m talking about words and phrases and paragraphs and even whole pages left out in what were almost certainly inadvertent copying mistakes. Anyone makes those kinds of mistakes when copy-typing by eye, and ACIM was copy-typed by eye many times between the first Notes and the first printing. We are told, and from the several early manuscripts we do have copies of we can see, that it was never thoroughly proofed before that first printing, and the inevitable copying mistakes which arise from that kind of copying were often not caught and corrected.
Then there are even more changes which appear to me to have been intended, but which are highly questionable. While some may be “corrections” of previous scribal or editing errors, some appear to be editing errors in their own right. In some of these instances it is certainly my considered opinion that the editor didn’t understand the material, thought there was a mistake, and thought s/he was correcting a mistake while in fact s/he actually introduced a mistake into an original which was perfectly correct. Most of these are “subjective” calls but there are so many in the latter category that they cannot be dismissed as “minor.”
Then there are the enormous deletions, including virtually all references to sex and possession. While opinions are going to vary as to the appropriateness of these omissions, many observers feel the material was incorrectly removed and properly belongs in the Course. In all there are some 60,000 words missing from later versions, and much of this material is difficult to view as “too personal” and thus never really belonging in the Course at all, although some of this material certainly is “personal” and was not intended to be part of the Course.
Opinions will vary as to whether some of the differences between versions represent “corrections” or “corruptions” of the originally intended message, but no opinion can be formed about them without being able to see them! And “access to them” is what “primary scholarship” aims to provide. At the very least we need accurate copies of all primary sources. With that we can readily produce a list or catalogue of all variant readings. This simply tracks each time, from one version to another, anything at all was changed, and indicates what the change was. With such a tool one can see at a glance, for any passage, whether it was accurately copied all the way through (and most of the Course was) or whether it was changed, and if changed, what the change was.
For some time now a fairly large collection of generally legible photocopies of three of the pre-1975 manuscript collections has been available. These is the Hugh Lynn Cayce typed manuscript, the Urtext typed manuscript and the Shorthand Notes handwritten manuscript. With access to these it is possible to locate any passage which exists in all three and see whether it was changed. But because these manuscripts have no common reference system, simply finding the passage in each can be a very tedious undertaking. It can literally take hours just to find a single passage in all three in their raw form.
The first and most fundamental “tool” for manuscript comparison is a common reference system. Most will be familiar with the Bible’s “chapter and verse” reference system. Each of the 66 books of the Bible is divided up into chapters of a few pages in length and “verses” of a few lines in length. For the past 400 years every edition of every version of the Bible in every language has used the same reference system. You can thus refer to any passage according not just to the most obvious top level division of “book” as in Matthew, Mark, Luke or John but with two numbers: chapter and verse, which specify that passage within a few lines. At the very least, to make them more usable, the primary sources of ACIM need to be fitted with some sort of “common reference system” so that I can readily find the same passage in another copy.
We can’t even use manuscript page numbers readily in many cases. The Urtext page numbers are erratic and often repeat, with the Notes in the two different published forms, the pagination differs. So for one person to identify a passage to another by page number often fails to actually identify the same page across two different copies. And of course most of the e-text and print editions which have appeared don’t preserve those original manuscript page indications anyway, making them useless there.
I began with the HLC version for several reasons, one of which was that it is divided up into chapters and sections and this provides a basic reference system. Later I marked these same chapter and section divisions in the Urtext and then the Notes. With that reference system it was finally possible to quickly locate any given passage in any of those versions, at least within a page or so.
In the age of computers a second obvious “primary source tool” is an accurate machine-readable copy of each of the manuscripts. With those we can not only quickly search for a character string through an entire document, we can also compare lengthy passages from different versions and the computer will instantly identify every difference. While these are never a complete replacement for the original manuscript or a good facsimile (photographic copy), if they include the original manuscript page numbers accurately, they provide a “lookup tool” for finding things in that manuscript.
This is a pretty basic task, making a computer “e-text” from a paper document. In the case of the ACIM manuscripts however, it presents many challenges. Due to the quality of the photocopies of the typed manuscripts, computer optical character recognition produces only about 80% accuracy in my tests. The 20% errors then have to be manually identified and corrected. It takes far less time to just type it into the computer by hand the average typist will produce something much more than 80% accurate, although still less than 100% accurate. Every typist makes some copying mistakes and those can only be found with through proofreading and that is extremely time-consuming.
A second problem with the typed manuscripts is that some pages are heavily marked up with handwritten modifications. In some cases these are obvious corrections of obvious errors such as spelling or capitalization mistakes in the original typed copy. In other cases the alteration suggested by the handwriting is not clearly a “correction” and the question arises as to whether we should include in our “e-text copy” the version of the passage that was originally typed or the version that was subsequently handwritten in? Whichever one chooses, one will have to leave out the other or else indicate it in a footnote.
The handwritten manuscripts present additional and more serious problems. While most of the typed manuscripts are legible and there is little doubt as to what is on the page, some pages of the handwritten manuscripts are of very poor quality and reading handwriting, especially shorthand portions, is often less than a precise science. It is not always possible to be certain what was intended, often one is left guessing as to what a given squiggle likely meant. The original Thetford Transcript could be extremely important for informing such guesses. Since it would represent what Schucman read to Thetford, and which se confirmed when he read it back to her, we can presume that most of the time it would represent what Schucman intended that squiggle to mean, and would do so with more certainty than the squiggle itself. However, we have very little of that original transcript so far. Most of the Urtext is a later re-typing and while it also likely represents what Schucman intended, it is less certain because like all unproofed typed copies, it is subject to inadvertent copying mistakes.
When I spent several years at a Mennonite Church College learning Biblical Scholarship, access to extensive primary source material was a given and the secondary scholarship we did, which is to say the study, analysis and interpretation of the text did not often stumble upon uncertainties as to what the “text” we were studying really was. We had behind us five hundred years worth of primary scholarship and where there were uncertainties, there was not only a vast literature about them, there was a scholarly consensus as to the most likely reading.
As I began to realize that ACIM was at least as important as the Bible, and indeed far more interesting to me, I immediately felt that the lack of access to decent primary scholarship was a major limitation on my study of the document. At the very least the serious student or scholar needs accurate source material! Concordances are of enormous use and every serious student recognizes them as essential for some purposes. Sure you can “study” anything in any way you choose, and you can probably build a house without a hammer and saw, finding other ways to pound nails or cut wood. But who would seriously try to build a house without a hammer and saw if those were available? And who can fail to recognize the value of these basic tools? And what trained builder wouldn’t begin a “house-building” assignment by getting the required tools together?
Wanting to “do secondary scholarship” on the Course, I felt I had to assemble at least a rudimentary “toolbox” of the basic implements required. I was also aware that these tools were equally needed by anyone else undertaking serious study of the Course. This wasn’t being done for myself alone. “Scholarship” is, by definition, not something “done alone.” It is always the work of communities and colleagues. While individuals make key contributions, no field of study is a private domain and every researcher is dependent on colleagues and the general public in a vast number of ways.
I wanted to have for ACIM at least something resembling the key tools I had for the Bible.
Back in the lat fall of 2002 when I set out to make my first “Concordance” to the Hugh Lynn Cayce version of ACIM, I thought it might take a few weeks. As the work proceeded I became aware that the JCIM e-text of the HLC wasn’t adequately proofed. There were still many typos in it. I began proofreading that e-text to the manuscript facsimile (photocopy) making corrections where problems were noticed. In the process I had to learn a great many things: how to proof with good reliability, how to code in HTML, how to use microcomputers for typesetting, and a hundred other things. I also learned that even after multiple passes of proofreading, some small errors had escaped notice.
Like most people I have a job and this work was done in “spare time.” Needless to say that severely limited the number of hours per day I could put into the project. As time went on I became more and more committed to what had begun as a “recreational” activity to produce a Concordance. I came to realize, from using even the very limited tools that were initially created, how enormously useful they were for a serious study of the Course. I also began to see clearly how they could be and needed to be expanded. What I did not see were two things. First, the amount of time required to do a decent job was considerably greater than I’d anticipated. I began to realize that proceeding on a part time basis working largely alone would require decades to reach the minimum level that I’d call “completion.” Secondly I did not anticipate the personal strain of, essentially, trying to do two full time jobs. I came to resent my “pay job” which I kept only out of the sense of “financial necessity.” Like everyone I have to eat and pay rent. In the manner of Jesus’ teaching about being unable to serve two masters, that one will end up loving one and hating the other, I found myself resenting my “pay job” and in many ways not doing either job adequately because my time and attention and resources were split. There were simply too many demands on my time and I lived from month to month constantly rushing from pillar to post, trying to carve out a few hours here and there to work on the Course materials, while neglecting many important things in life which were perhaps not “urgent.”
One of the most difficult things I’ve had to learn is to recognize I can’t do this all by myself and ask for help.
The job of proofing and transcribing and cross-referencing and then publishing the primary source material for A Course in Miracles is a huge one which may not be properly completed for generations. It takes large amounts of time and to date has been almost entirely done by volunteers – mostly myself – and has been almost entirely financed by myself. Since I’m not a wealthy man this situation has some obvious problems. I have been living with the perception of never having “enough money” and one of the reasons is that I’ve been extremely shy about asking for assistance, even from people who have expressed a willingness to offer it.
The Holy Spirit has been working on my “money shyness” issue the past little while and I want to share a bit of that with you.
I’m certainly not fond of the idea of “Upper class Spirituality” where the price tag for “enlightenment instruction” is higher than many can afford. I think the balance struck by the Church for most the past two thousand years is a good one. No “fee” is charged for basic services but “donations” are solicited, encouraged and accepted without shyness. Some things associated with Churches, such as the purchase of Bibles for instance, may be subsidized but are rarely free. In fact the “Church Proper” has largely left the publishing of Bibles to the publishing industry. It’s main contribution has been subsidizing Biblical Scholarship through Church-supported colleges which train scholars and sponsor their research.
If one believes in what one is doing, one should be able to ask for help without shyness. The “shyness” is really a fear of criticism, notably that criticism which says you shouldn’t “sell” spirituality. The path of loving service not only offers without demand or requirement for reward, it also offers without fear of criticism, and that aspect of my “service” has been wanting. I have been fearful of criticism.
In this little essay you see me beginning to emerge from that state!
It is my policy, and will continue to be my policy to make most of the information I have freely available on a “no-charge” website. Copies on physical media which cost money to manufacture and ship have been sold at a markup which barely covers “handling costs” and the “handling costs” are mostly my time in filling the orders, time which is taken directly away from work on the project. Recently I’ve “contracted out” the sale and shipping and manufacture of the physical media … essentially that means hiring someone to do it. Most of the material involved will continue to be available in at least a limited form on the website. The Seven Volume Urtext, for instance, is available as a printed book for a price, but that same material … the exact same words … is also available for free on the website. The main difference is in the formatting. The PDF image files of the original manuscripts will be made available on the website in quite usable but lower resolution copies. Most people will find these entirely adequate.
I realize there are some who object even to selling books, thinking they should be given away. If I could afford to, I’d be happy to give them away but like everyone I need to eat and the amount of time available for this project, which means the speed with which it gets done, is directly a function of available financial resources. To date I’ve been the source of almost all the financial resources. That limitation has limited the work. I have to hold a job to make the money to support the project and while earning that money I’m obviously not working on the project.
A number of events in my life recently have convinced me that I either have to overcome my shyness about asking for help – because God knows I need help – or essentially abandon any realistic hope of making this material available to the world in a good, polished and professional form any time soon. While I have sold a few books and CDs, for the most part the volume has been such that it’s been more of a “nuisance centre” than a “profit centre.”
I feel this project is sufficiently important to have devoted most of my time and financial resources to it for the past six years. Yet it is very clear to me that I have neither enough time nor adequate personal financial resources to see the job through to the standard it deserves in a timely manner. There is simply too much work for one man who can only devote himself to it part time.
Your donations enable to me to put more time into the project and may eventually help enable me to hire professional proofreading and typesetting and web design services which would have three very positive results.
1) The material will achieve a higher degree of accuracy more quickly
2) Completed work will get published more quickly
3) Everything would be presented in a more professional and hopefully more useful form.
Thorough, meticulous proofreading alone takes thousands of hours when dealing with thousands of pages of typed and handwritten manuscripts. Typesetting and presentation of the material on web pages takes an unbelievably long time. Most of the work is not particularly difficult – its just that there is a great deal of it – and some of the time-consuming tasks would go very quickly for people with expertise in the relevant fields. On the current “Jack of all Trades” basis where I have to figure out how to do each element, often from scratch, it’s a long slow process.
A fourth advantage is that with adequate resources, other scholars who I know could make a significant contribution, could be supported enabling them to also devote more time to the task.
Why I feel this
project is important
I believe that A Course in Miracles is at least as important as the Bible. It’s influence and credibility and authority in the world suffers from problems of “accuracy.” What “authority” can people be reasonably expected to give to any words if their provenance and authenticity is unknown, or even known to be suspect? When we quote from the Course most of us want to know if what we’re quoting is the “authentic original dictation” or a typing error! While I’m very aware that “precise accuracy” is “not crucial” for many personal applications, it can make a huge difference for many purposes.
For some purposes, notably those of a skeptical world, it doesn’t matter that most accuracy issues really are “minor.” For some purposes, it’s either accurate or it isn’t, and if it is not, however “minor” the problem, skepticism is fuelled. This is especially the case when the degree of accuracy claimed is higher than that delivered. Many editions of ACIM have appeared which claimed higher levels of accuracy than they delivered. Such mistaken claims to accuracy simply serve to fuel the skeptic’s suspicion that there is some degree of deception involved with this material, or with its presentation.
The only way I know of to address those credibility issues is to produce the most accurate material possible, make the “originals” available for verification, and make no claims of accuracy which are not scrupulously and precisely accurate.
Quite aside from “credibility” in “the world” there are other serious issues relating to accuracy. While it is true that a great many of the differences between versions appear rather minor to most observers, no one even knows what all the differences are yet! It’s impossible to say that they are all unimportant until they’ve all been examined and there are a number I’ve seen which strike me as quite significant. For those students of the Course who sincerely wish to know and understand what Jesus is trying to tell us in the pages, while precise accuracy may not be essential, it certainly can be and often is extremely helpful! Most obviously, if you are confident in the accuracy of a copy you don’t have to ponder “I wonder if that is what really was dictated” nearly so often.
Due to the fact that the major ideas in ACIM are frequently repeated for reinforcement, an error in one presentation will often be compensated for in another presentation of the same idea. So while few errors are likely to profoundly alter a person’s view of the Course’s teaching overall, for those paragraphs and sections where serious errors arise, that paragraph or section seriously loses elements of its meaning which may be important. Many is the time when I have stumbled over the wording in the 1975 abridgement wondering what the heck a certain paragraph meant only to find, when I read the same passage in an earlier version, the paragraph’s meaning was entirely clear. Due to the high frequency of inadvertent copying mistakes involving a few words left out, antecedents sometimes get dropped resulting in a largely incoherent or even directly incorrect reading. While these can be viewed as ‘minor errors’ in the cosmic scheme of things, in my view why not clean them up and make the material clearer and more readable and thus more accessible to a larger audience?
For those who share this sense of importance and feel led by the Holy Spirit to contribute, there are several ways you can do it. You certainly may send cheques or money orders to me at the address below. To use your credit card or Paypal account, click on the link at the bottom of this page.
Because I’m in
Of course, you must be connected to the Internet for the link to work as it takes you to the Paypal site.
If you wish donate, and I assure a donation of even a dollar is helpful, please click here: DONATE