FOOTNOTES

*1 I am not drawing any rigid distinction between religious experience and spiritual experience; I am using the terms more or less synonymously.

*2 Ein Sof is an alternate transliteration of Ain Sof.

*3 The Self as center is sometimes counted in esoteric enumeration, sometimes left out. The most obvious example is the creation account in Genesis, with six days of creation and one day of rest, symbolizing the timeless, unmoving, and eternal Self in the center. The ten-directional concept below, as described in the Sefer Yetzirah, does not include this central point.

*4 For a fuller discussion of Gnosticism and its influence, see my Forbidden Faith: The Secret History of Gnosticism.

*5 For a guided meditation intended to illuminate this idea, see here of my book Inner Christianity.

*6 Please see “Note on Citations from A Course in Miracles” at the beginning of this book.

*7 There is a semantic ambiguity here. The Course is written in a high literary style (although it is in prose, much of it scans as blank verse). Here “the Son remembered not to laugh,” stated in a more ordinary fashion, means “the Son of God did not remember to laugh.”

*8 This passage is difficult because of the text’s rather confusing use of pronouns. Bracketed insertions are adopted from Wapnick, Love Does Not Condemn, 432. Chapters 11 through 19 of Wapnick’s book are an excellent introduction to the Course’s theology.

*9 This usage of the term ego differs also from its meanings in the passages quoted from Papus (page 16) and Stephan Hoeller (page 53).

*10 The most insightful discussion of this issue that I know of is in Owen Barfield’s Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry. The “idolatry” mentioned in the subtitle is precisely this mistaking of representations for the actuality.

*11 One point to note in passing: there is some evidence that the Romans, jealous of the power of administering capital punishment, took this power from the Jewish Sanhedrin around AD 30. If this is true, it could provide the historical context for the crucifixion. The Sanhedrin condemned Jesus as a blasphemer, but no longer had the power to have him stoned to death. They brought him to Pilate, presenting him with a dilemma: Jesus was ostensibly guilty by the Jewish Law but not by Roman law. This fact would explain Pilate’s hesitation to condemn Jesus, because, by Roman standards, he was innocent. The stoning of Stephen a year or two later (Acts 6:5–7:60) would suggest that by then the power to condemn a man to death for blasphemy had been restored to the Jewish authorities. For a discussion, see Brown, The Anchor Bible: The Gospel according to John 1:337 and 2:849–50. Brown cites the Jerusalem Talmud, Sanhedrin, I 18a, 34; VII 24b, 41.

*12 The history of this doctrine is more intricate than I am portraying it here. It was, for example, preceded by Origen’s theory, accepted by both the church fathers and Augustine, that Jesus’s death was kind of a ransom paid to Satan. But Anselm’s view, developed in his essay Cur Deus Homo, has prevailed in the Western church over the last thousand years. For a concise history of this doctrine, see the article “Atonement,” in Cross and Livingstone, The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, 122–24.

*13 The dating of the Epistle to the Hebrews is as disputed as its authorship. I personally find it difficult to believe that it was written after the sack of the Temple in 70, in the first place because the author does not seem to know of it, and in the second place because the Temple’s destruction and the cessation of its sacrifices would have been extraordinarily useful for him polemically. For a summary of the positions, see Brown, Introduction to the New Testament, 696–97.

*14 The Course uses the term brother to indicate all individuals with whom one has a relationship, regardless of the nature of the relationship or the person’s gender.

*15 It is important to avoid confusing this Personality with the ego as described by the Course.

*16 Jung saw this over eighty years ago. In a 1937 lecture, he said, “But if [man] declares this ‘tremendum’ to be dead, then he should find out at once where this considerable energy, which was once invested in an existence as great as God, has disappeared to. It might reappear under another name, it might call itself ‘Wotan’ or ‘State’ or something ending with -ism, even atheism, of which people believe, hope, and expect as much as they did of God.” Jung, Psychology and Religion, 104. “Tremendum” refers to the mysterium tremendum et fascinans, the “awesome and beguiling mystery” of Rudolf Otto, referring to the experience of the divine.