A Course in Miracles

Kenneth Wapnick ( born February 22, 1942 in Brooklyn, New York, † December 27, 2013 in Temecula, California ) was an American psychologist, psychotherapist, author and teacher. He was a world-renowned expert and teacher of the spiritual textbook A Course in Miracles. His books, articles and seminars are essential for a thorough understanding of the thought system of the course.

Wapnick was a close friend of Helen Schucman and William Thetford, who recorded A Course in Miracles, and instrumental in the publication of the course.

Major works are The Message of A Course in Miracles (1997), Helen Schucman Biography Beyond the Bliss ( 1991) and Love Does Not Condemn: The World, the Flesh, and the Devil According to Platonism, Christianity, Gnosticism, and A Course in Miracles (1989).

Together with his wife Gloria Wapnick initiated the " Foundation for A Course in Miracles" ( Foundation for A Course in Miracles ), an academy and conference center in Temecula, California. He was a board member of the " Foundation for Inner Peace ," the editor of American Original Edition A Course in Miracles.

Life

Kenneth Wapnick attended a Jewish elementary school, though his parents were not very religious, and then moved on to high school. There he began to be interested in Freud and for music, especially Beethoven and Mozart. After high school graduation, he studied clinical psychology. His interest in the spiritual dimension of human experience, following, he completed a doctorate on the Spanish mystic Teresa of Avila under the title " The Psychology of the Mystical Experience" ( The psychology of mystical experience) and received his doctorate in 1968.

Wapnick worked as a psychotherapist, school psychologist and chief psychologist of a mental hospital. In 1970 he separated from his first wife. After visiting the Trappist monastery of Gethsemani in Kentucky, he was baptized a Catholic in 1972. He resigned from his job and spent several months in various monasteries in Israel.

1972 Wapnick met in New York to psychology professors Helen Schucman and William Thetford, who had recorded A Course in Miracles by the Transmission inner voice to Schucman the spiritual textbook. Schucman and Wapnick edited together the manuscript. They removed personally colored passages, divided the work into chapters and sections, which provided them with headings, and revised paragraph formatting, punctuation and capitalization, but without changing the content. A Course in Miracles was the Wapnick as a board member was a member from the Foundation for Inner Peace, published in 1976.

Together with his second wife, Gloria, whom he married in 1981, founded Wapnick 1982, the " Foundation for A Course in Miracles" ( Foundation for A Course in Miracles ) in Ardsley, New York. It expanded in 1984 to a training center in Crompond, New York, and opened in 1988 in Roscoe, New York, an academy and conference center that a nationally recognized educational institution in 1995. Since 2001, the Foundation has its headquarters in Temecula, California. Kenneth and Gloria Wapnick see the model of its Foundation in Plato's Academy. Your goal is in their lectures, seminars and publications to promote the understanding of A Course in Miracles and its practical application in everyday life and to deepen. In addition, Kenneth Wapnick supervised the translation of A Course in Miracles in non-English languages.

Work

Kenneth Wapnicks work dealt with the explanation and commentary on the spiritual textbook A Course in Miracles. His aim was to provide a basis for a thorough understanding of the system of thought and the application of the course.

A Course in Miracles and Christianity

In his first books (esp. Forgiveness and Jesus, 1983) suggests Wapnick a bridge between the price and the Christianity. He shows how the course picks up Christian terms, in order to redefine and to rectify the traditional thinking from his point of view. He describes the course frequently as a " correction of Christianity " and presents opportunities for reconsideration of statements from the New Testament in the light of the teachings of the course.

After his early period is Wapnick the course more clearly as an independent spiritual path dar. In A Course in Miracles and Christianity: a dialogue have Wapnick and the philosopher and Jesuit priest Norris Clarke after jointly that the course and the Bible are mutually exclusive theologies not be integrated into a system.

Presentation of the course and its contribution

With The Message of A Course in Miracles (1997) Wapnick provides a comprehensive systematic presentation of the course and its key messages. He explains that the course presents his nonduales thought system on two levels: The first level distinguishes the metaphysical spiritual reality of heaven from the illusory world of perception. The second, more practical level remains in the perceptible world and distinguishes between two modes of interpretation of what is perceived: the judgment of the ego and the forgiveness of the Holy Spirit.

Wapnick shows that the course adds a significant new thoughts on the non-dual metaphysics from the tradition of Advaita Vedanta: a motivation for the apparent emergence of the physical universe and the perceptible world - the desire for individual existence without taking responsibility for it.

According to Wapnick, the psychology of the course rests substantially on the earlier work of Sigmund Freud. After Wapnick the course offers supplementary addition, a way out of the ego - mind. According to him, the course of Freud's complete portrait of the human psyche, by emphasizing the human decision to identify with the ego thought system of guilt, fear and attack, as a defense against the choice of the thought system of the Holy Spirit of forgiveness, healing and peace. With his forgiveness teaching the course delivers to Wapnick a method that makes the conscious ego - mind by judging disinterested contemplation and allows to make a different decision, which goes beyond the ego - mind.

In The Illusion of Time (1990 ) Wapnick works out the holographic, non-linear theory of time of the course. The book series The Practice of A Course in Miracles is dedicated to the practical application of the ' course ' in everyday life.

Biography Helen Schucman

Wapnick is the author of a biography of Helen Schucman ( Beyond Bliss, 1991). He describes her visionary experiences, her relationship with William Thetford and the history of the transcript of A Course in Miracles and traces the ambivalent relationship that had the Schucman to God and Jesus.

Classification of the course

Wapnicks work demonstrates the history of ideas and parallels the main differences of the course in particular to Christianity, Plato, Neoplatonism and philosophical idealism, Gnosticism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Freud's psychoanalytic theory and recent movements such as New Age. In this way, Wapnick allows a classification of the course within the philosophical and spiritual systems of thought in the world.

In Love Does Not Condemn: The World, the Flesh, and the Devil According to Platonism, Christianity, Gnosticism, and A Course in Miracles (1989 ) Wapnick shows how A Course in Miracles solves the theological- philosophical problem of theodicy: the question as an imperfect material world, in the obviously evil and suffering are omnipresent, can originate from a perfect immaterial omnipotent - all-good God. After Wapnicks argument must be a theology or philosophy, which begins with the premise that the visible world is in some way a manifestation of God's will, inevitably go in the paradoxical case that it locates an inherent flaw within the omnipotent, all-good God, a contains tendency to evil, to suffering and death, or at least, according to the traditional christian theological position, a will allows. Therefore is every mindset that sees this world as ontologically real, with an insoluble dilemma. Some Gnostic schools of the second century, especially the African Valentinian, held a real world of misery incompatible with a loving God and therefore regarded the material world as an illusion, but given her psychological reality by declaring the stronghold of sin. A Course in Miracles Wapnick According solves the paradox by presenting his thought system on two levels. The course considers the physical world as an illusion, but not as inherently negative. Rather, it serves when we give it to us this purpose, as a " royal road to heaven," as a valuable school to learn with the help of the Holy Spirit forgiveness.

Second edition of the course and concordance

In addition to its own publications Wapnick edited the second edition of A Course in Miracles (1992 ), the first time contains a record count. He led the creation of the concordance to A Course in Miracles, which is based on the Bible and the works of Shakespeare on the model of concordances.

Overall Wapnick has more than 20 books on A Course in Miracles published (2006 ). Translations have been published in eight languages.