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About this Edition of A Course in Miracles
CONTENTS
A Brief Introduction to ACIM’s Origins and History
The Five Known Versions and Several Editions of the ACIM Text 14
Preface to the Corrected Hugh Lynn Cayce Version
Global Style and Capitalization issues
General Capitalization Uncertainties
By Doug Thompson
In November of 1965, Psychology Professor Helen Schucman heard what she came to call an “inner dictation” speak the words “You will see miracles through your hands through Me” which she then recorded in her notebook. This followed days of conversations with a “Voice” she had begun to hear in her head. The next words she recorded were: “This is a course in miracles, please take notes.” Thus began A Course in Miracles.
For more than a decade Schucman continued taking notes in her own unique mix of shorthand and longhand, and these form the basis for the book A Course in Miracles, or just ACIM, which has sold more than a million copies since its first large scale printing in 1976.
Questioning her own sanity when the “Voice” first showed up in 1965, Schucman shared her experiences with her friend, colleague, and supervisor, Dr. William (Bill) Thetford, chairman of the Medical Psychology Department at Columbia University. Over the next several years, he typed up her “dictations” day by day as she read aloud to him from her notebooks. Thetford did not believe Schucman was going crazy, and her professional work was in no way impaired by this “scribing” activity they shared.
The Scribes were later to trace the origins of what the Notes calls “Bill’s better idea” to a comment Thetford had made to Schucman after a particularly acrimonious academic meeting. Thetford had said “there must be a better way” and Schucman had agreed to help him find it. This event, both Scribes later recounted, this agreement to “seek” for a “better way” and to do it together and collaboratively was the “invitation” which resulted in the Course. Shortly afterward, the words “this is a Course in Miracles” were penned, a course which “the Voice” frequently later referred to as “Bill’s course.”
The material Schucman and Thetford recorded is amongst the most extraordinary literature ever penned in the English language. In all there were over 3,000 pages of shorthand notes, much of it in perfect Iambic Pentameter representing the largest single example of Iambic Pentameter that we know of.
The “Voice” Schucman heard identified himself as the historical Jesus of Nazareth, commented on the Bible extensively, even offering a number of corrections, and spoke at great length about several of the Bible’s major themes. Anyone who has ever wondered “What did Jesus really mean” by such statements as “seek ye first the Kingdom of God and all else shall be added unto you” will be thrilled to find, in ACIM, extensive discourses elaborating this and many other ideas which are briefly and tantalizingly mentioned in the New Testament. Of the three years of his public ministry noted in the New Testament, during which Jesus was said to be teaching in public and private extensively, we have remarkably few direct quotes attributed to him and only a few dozen pages of biographical material. It is an astonishing paucity of detail. If the claims made by ACIM’s author are true, that lack of detail concerning the thought of Jesus has been partly rectified in this book.
As the title of the book suggests, and the opening 53 Principles of Miracles detail, there is a great deal of discussion about what miracles are, how they happen, and how one can grow into becoming a “miracle-minded” person who is then a “miracle worker.” And yes, it doesn’t stop short of discussing raising the dead.
One of the most remarkable statements on this topic was edited out of the abridged edition published in 1975. In it Jesus explains that it is “hellfire” which should be taken allegorically, and “raising the dead” which should be taken literally. This is found in VIII I 7 , on page 66 of this edition.
Both Schucman and Thetford were persuaded of the authenticity of the material, although at first they did not know they were taking down an extensive lecture series by Jesus addressed to the whole world!
The two Psychology professors continued teaching and conducting research while they scribed ACIM. They were very aware that in the intellectual climate of New York in 1965 the material would not be acceptable in “academic” circles and their participation in something so “flaky” could seriously threaten their careers should it become known. Thus they kept this work largely secret until 1975, sharing copies only with a few people.
Volume I: Text
The “Scribing” of ACIM came in several distinct stages which have been organized into several volumes. The first, scribed between 1965 and 1968 is the “Text.” Schucman and Thetford were later to organize the thousand-odd pages of typescript of this volume into 31 chapters with several sections in each. We don’t know exactly how many typed pages the original Thetford typescript, or Urtext is because no copy has yet come to light. The oldest available typescript is 1079 pages. There is good reason to believe that the original is considerably longer. Each chapter and section was given a title and some of the divisions represent real transition points in the material. Others appear largely arbitrary. So too, the titles of the chapters and sections sometimes appear to the reader to be uninformative and apparently mostly unconnected to the content of the section. While not part of the original dictation, these chapter and section divisions and titles have been retained because they are well known, widely used and useful for referencing specific locations in the text (see below: Annotation System).
Volume II: Workbook
A few months after the Text volume was finished in 1968, a second began to be dictated by the “Voice.” Volume II has become known as the “Workbook.” It consists of 361 “lessons” plus numerous pithy discourses along with six “reviews”. The reader is advised to do no more than one lesson per day which would take at least a year. The Workbook has two parts, the first aimed at “undoing” the ego’s thought system which is inimical to the divine nature and the second aimed at restoring the mind to the Creator’s thought system, and thus opening to the divine and the miraculous.
Volume III: Manual for Teachers
The third volume is called the “Manual for Teachers.” We are all “Teachers” all the time, we are told. We cannot be or do anything without “teaching.” Calling on all readers to advance toward becoming “Teachers of God,” the third volume offers some practical advice and admonition to readers.
Volume IV: Use of Terms
There is a fourth volume, the Use of Terms, included in the “Urtext” material filed at United States Copyright Office (USCO). In later FIP editions it appears as an appendix to the Manual under the name “Clarification of Terms.” Schucman scribed this material after ACIM was first published in the “Xerox Edition” (Criswell) in 1975 in response to questions from readers about the meaning of terms. While some of it appears to be genuinely Jesus, other parts of it are clearly inaccurate, which has led many to doubt whether it should be included in the “canon” of ACIM at all. Jesus is referred to in the third person, indicating authorship by someone else. In the same time period, 1975-1976, Schucman recorded a number of “Special Messages” which very few regard as “canonical” due to the fact that they involve a number of specific “future predictions” which didn’t come to pass, along with other distinct errors! In this period of the Special Messages and the Clarification of Terms, it appears Schucman’s fears about the first publication of the Course and the beginnings of the copyright controversy with her alleged “message from the Voice” directing the material to be copyrighted, were blocking her clear “channel” to Jesus such that the messages were sometimes coming through garbled. This tiny volume appears to reflect much of the same thought as the earlier ACIM volumes but includes enough suspect material to make its inclusion in the ACIM canon somewhat controversial.
Volume V: Psychotherapy
Two other smaller volumes were also scribed. One is called Psychotherapy, and the other Song of Prayer. The reader can instantly recognize the same “Voice” and wisdom in these two.
The Psychotherapy volume deals with the spiritual dynamics of the patient-therapist relationship along with many practical considerations, right down to setting prices. Given that Helen and Bill were Psychologists, the relevance to their professional work is obvious. Given the emphasis in the Course on healing, the relevance to everyone is equally obvious.
Volume VI: Song Of Prayer
This beautiful and poetic little volume addresses directly the issue of communication between man and God, in touching, intense, intimate and beautiful language. It is a rich treasury of practical advice and metaphysical insight.
After each volume was “scribed,” Schucman and Thetford, later with the help of Ken Wapnick, and finally without Thetford’s active participation at all, undertook to edit Thetford’s typescripts (documents also known as “urtexts” or “original texts”) to make the material suitable for print publication. At the time none of the participants appear to have had any idea the material they were working on would come to be viewed by many as “Scripture” nor that scholarly interest would develop concerning the precise original wording and punctuation as scholars sought to analyse every nuance of the message.
The “Voice” did instruct Thetford to remove some of the explicitly personal material directed only to the scribes themselves which shows up alongside the “Course” in the original dictation in the early chapters. The “Voice” specifically assigned this task to Thetford and directed Schucman not to do the editing herself, one of several instructions she appears to have been unable to comply with, and which was to be the cause of much difficulty and confusion later.
We know from the few fragments of the original Notes which have been made public by Kenneth Wapnick in Absence from Felicity, that the Voice also said “every word is important” and indicated that future correction of extant errors would occur. While every word may have been important to the “Voice”, and any genuine scholars coming to work with the material later, some of the subsequent editors clearly did not share this view. One of them, Dr. Kenneth Wapnick, has publicly criticized the idea of “every word” being important. While most can recognize that an obsession with words, as “form” can be misused to obscure the meaning, or “content,” words are also content and when they are changed or removed the meaning often changes. Meddling with “Holy Scripture” to “correct” what it says to suit the preferences of editors and authorities has been a popular pastime throughout religious history. It’s the bane of Scriptural Scholarship where the goal is to understand ‘what was written.’ This is not to say that later editor’s views of ‘what was written’ are not of interest or even importance. It is only to say that we’d like to know which is which, and whether we are reading the words of the author or those of his editors!
Schucman stated that while Thetford “didn’t want to change anything” she wanted to change nearly everything, did so, and then changed it back. Little evidence has surfaced to date that Schucman “undid” more than a handful of the thousands of changes she made, even when it was an obvious inadvertent mistake, except in the case of blatant spelling errors. Once she changed something, we can see from the several versions now available, the changes remained into all subsequent revisions and very rarely were any restored to an earlier form except when they involved obvious spelling and grammar errors. However, we certainly do not have all of Schucman’s editing drafts and there may be some which contain alterations she later rejected, restoring the material to a previous form.
The early editing did follow the “Voice’s” instructions to the extent that some personal material was removed, and some specific dictated corrections were made. Other dictated corrections were not made and the editors removed a great deal more than just the “specifically personal” material of no general value. Schucman re-wrote the first few chapters at least three and there is evidence to suggest perhaps as many as four or even more times. Portions of those first few chapters may have been re-written even more frequently. In each case we can see from those of her drafts which are available that she re-typed the previous draft with changes and some corrections of typos and introduced a few new typos. Inevitably, copy-typing such large documents results in inadvertent omissions of words, phrases, lines, whole paragraphs and in one case an entire page.
Why they never proofread the new drafts against the original I do not know. I suspect they were A) largely unaware of how many errors they had inadvertently introduced and B) simply didn’t have the time and resources to do it. Thorough proofreading of large documents requires thousands of hours. However, they didn’t proof against the original nor even the immediately preceding version, and thus in each editing pass new errors were introduced inadvertently. There were also apparently intentional changes made by the editors of a highly questionable nature, completely rewriting and often distorting some sections for no apparent reason. Robert Perry, noting some of the surprising introductions of errors this involved, has proposed that Schucman, who often expressed embarrassment about the style of the early chapters, was attempting to make the informal and conversational style of the early chapters resemble the grandeur of the high poetry of the later chapters.
Having worked daily with Schucman’s typescripts for the past three years, proofing what she was unable to proof, and documenting the evolution of the material from version to version as she worked through it, I have gained enormous respect for her and the magnitude and difficulty of the task she undertook without the assistance of computers! In a sense I have been retracing her steps from her notes as one might do those of historic explorers from their journals. It’s not the same but you certainly can see some of what they saw and appreciate in greater detail the magnitude of the accomplishment. I do not wish my observations of the imperfections in the results to be interpreted as negative criticism of Schucman and Thetford. With the resources and technology and time available to them in the early 70s, when “cut and paste” really did mean “scissors and glue” and where a “text search” was done by eyeballing sheets of printed paper, what they accomplished is nothing short of remarkable. That it failed to achieve total perfection in every regard is hardly surprising! If there is “criticism” warranted anywhere it might be of the “myth” of infallible editing which has grown up since Schucman and Thetford handed their unfinished work on to others. This idea that “Jesus” directed every pencil stroke and ensured a total absence of error is very clearly not an idea with any truth to it.
Indeed, that they managed to get it published at all, and that it was at least mostly correct, appears to be a miracle!
The “personal material” which was later, and probably correctly removed from the Course, deals extensively with the difficulties Bill and Helen had with each other as well as with the Course. Bill’s tendency to be a “professor who refuses to profess” and withdraw from his assignment is dealt with, as is Helen’s reluctance to do as she’s asked by the Voice, which is to “help Bill” with “Bill’s better idea.”
Toward the end of the scribing, Helen and Bill had increasing difficulty collaborating, and some sense of the dynamics is offered by Kenneth Wapnick in his book Absence from Felicity whose title describes the situation he found when he met them in 1973 and began to help them get the material ready for printing.
Bill Thetford would never be the “professor” of the Course which the dictation clearly calls on him to be, nor would he ever fully exercise the role of “editor” he is assigned. Helen Schucman, whom Ken Wapnick described as a “compulsive” editor, took over the editing role and by her own admission “wanted to change everything” and proceeded to change a great deal. While she also noted that Thetford “wanted to change nothing” she not only failed to “help him” in his role, as she was repeatedly asked, but proceeded to actively obstruct him by making changes herself, changes the Voice specifically stated were Thetford’s responsibility and not hers.
Schucman’s severe difficulties with doing the editing, described in some detail by Wapnick, and obviously resulting from the fact that it was not her job but rather Bill’s, were partly solved when Ken himself proceeded to edit the material for her. Ken describes how he had to initiate the editing, how Helen was enormously resistant to it, and even “invariably fell asleep” when the two were attempting to edit together. No wonder there were some problems with the result!
What Ken Wapnick almost certainly didn’t know in 1973 when he first read this version of ACIM, was how much had already been changed, how many inadvertent mistakes had already crept in, and that Thetford, not Schucman, had been specifically assigned the editing task. He found Schuman’s massive psychological resistance to editing a bit mystifying and did not apparently suspect a very obvious explanation for it. It wasn’t her job! Nor, apparently, was it his. Why Thetford was assigned the role of editor is obvious. He “didn’t want to change anything” and had enormous respect for “every word” apparently accepting the Author’s statement that “every word is meaningful.” This is not a view which was shared by either Schucman or Wapnick. Unlike Wapnick, Schucman knew she was “out of line” and operating contrary to specific instructions. Wapnick quite correctly recognized the importance of getting the material printed and fully recognized that the Scribes needed help and had effectively ceased to be able to collaborate effectively, but what he might have figured out if he had been privy then to the original dictation, some of which is still secret, is that it was Thetford he should be helping and the help Schucman needed was to understand that she too should be helping Thetford. And perhaps the help Thetford most needed was in accepting that he’d been given the task and needed to follow instructions and accept his role, something he never did!
Astonishingly, with the first publication of the Course in 1975, the claim was made that it had not been extensively edited and that what was published was “virtually unchanged” from the original dictation, save for the removal of “personal material.” This is astonishing because A) that is what they Scribes had been instructed to do (and what Thetford wanted but failed to do) and B) because that is so very far from what they actually did. There are many visible reasons for this, and while a few have been suggested here, it is beyond the scope of this item to inquire further into them.
The single most astonishing thing is that they all knew it wasn’t true but they said it was anyway. By this stage in the Course’s history, the Scribes’ inability to deal with their difficulties in collaboration had been “solved” by a complete denial of the difficulty and the failure of collaboration in the final stages. The denial was so total that they could somehow, in good conscience, simply state that there was no problem even though we can now tell they could not possibly have believed that without rather enormous denial of the facts. They “changed the Course” and they weren’t supposed to. They knew they weren’t supposed to and resolved the conflict simply by saying they hadn’t done what they certainly did do.
Later Wapnick was to publicise the idea that “Jesus” had directed the editing and that he and Helen “felt” it was just the way Jesus wanted it. By the final stage Jesus may well have been thinking that any way at all was ok so long as they got it printed! The corrections would have to wait for more open and receptive channels who, even if they were to disobey instructions, wouldn’t lie about it to themselves and the world.
This substantial denial and self-deception which was soon to become public deception led to the necessity of a substantial cover-up.
Following the publication of the highly edited version in 1975, the original notebooks and typescripts were locked up and while some of that material has been discovered and published, some of it still remains hidden. In place of the “history” of the Course’s origins and in place of the actual authentic original dictation itself we have a “mythical” account of the origins and the publication of a substantially abridged and changed version of the Course.
Enough has been made public so far that the “myth” of editing being divinely guided is now as credible as the claims of the Flat Earth Society. But until late 1999, that myth was steadfastly maintained, widely believed, and there was no evidence available by which to challenge it. The evidence was locked up and the early efforts to publish it were instantly met by lawsuits, gag orders and court injunctions initiated by Kenneth Wapnick.
This secrecy and deception is alarmingly reminiscent of the early history of much of the Bible whose original manuscripts are all lost, and which has suffered greatly from “editing” by well-meaning copyists who only managed to muddy the message, introduce confusion, and undermine the authority of great writings by “correcting” what they imagined were “errors”. The good fortune for the Course is that the distortions were discovered early enough, before the original material was all lost, that correction is possible. The publication of this volume which represents the Text of ACIM as Thetford and Schucman had edited it before Wapnick proceeded to initiate the removal of about a quarter of the first five chapters, is one step toward recovering the “Authentic Original Dictation of ACIM”
In the original dictation the Bible’s problems and also those of the work of Edgar Cayce are mentioned directly in the context of “corrections” to ACIM. Jesus assures Schucman that he will ensure that corrections will be made, even if that happens generations later. He also states that he will make “every effort” to correct scribal errors but that she must ask. As we can see, not only did the Scribes decline to ask in the end, they actively denied that there was any need for “correction.”
This version is not the original dictation and it is missing some important material, but it is one large step toward undoing the mistakes of the past in the present and thus releasing the future.
There is quite a bit of obvious error in all the ACIM manuscripts and editions to date. While many changes introduced by the editors are indisputably mistakes, and often almost certainly inadvertent ones, they also did sometimes correct previous mistakes. There is usually little doubt as to which change is a “correction” and which is a “corruption,” but not always. Every change, then, must be carefully considered. And when “considering” we must be sure to do what the original Scribes found they could not, and that is to ask!
This edition is one step toward shedding light on the editing process and revealing its underpinnings and shortcomings such that an advance toward restoring the “authentic” dictation can be made. As such it is a very small step indeed. What is left to be done is much greater in size than what has already been done. Each editing change at every stage must be examined, which is rather difficult as long as some of the primary source material remains hidden. As that is done in a spirit of honest inquiry with the desire only to establish the truth, the “purity and integrity” of ACIM, which has been so severely compromised, will eventually be restored as the Author assured Helen and Bill it would be.
The Five Historical Versions
On page 7 is a table listing of all renditions, redactions, recensions, versions and editions of ACIM which are known or said to exist.
There are a few things which need to be said by way of introduction to that material.
There are only five clearly recognizable distinct versions of the entire volume 1 as of August 2006. New versions may appear in the future but today, while there are many different “editions”, they are all editions of one of these five versions. It is known that there were more than five editing passes made on some of the material, but the intermediate drafts either have not survived or have not been made public. We have then, reliable information as to the existence of these five and we have intact copies of the entirely of three of them, some of a fourth, but none at all of one. The one which no one I know has seen, or is willing to admit to having seen, is the original Thetford Typescript. Its existence is well-attested, by Thetford himself, but its whereabouts or precise content is, at the moment, a mystery.
Version One : The Notes
The earliest form of the Course is Helen’s first manuscript in her notebooks, and that has not only survived, some of it has been published and all of it is accessible at the United States Copyright Office (USCO). Unfortunately, due to a copyright claim on the material by Kenneth Wapnick, and his refusal to allow the material to be published, while the USCO material can be inspected, it cannot be copied. While this difficulty is certainly temporary, difficulties of access have limited scholarly review of the original dictation.
Version Two: Thetford’s Typescript (Urtext)
Bill and Helen reported that day by day as Helen was taking notes by hand, she would dictate these to Bill who typed them up and then read back what he’d typed to ensure accuracy. It is this original typescript which is called the “Urtext” or “original text” in early Course writings.
Version Three: Helen’s First Retyping
Also at the USCO is an early typescript of the Text which is not, however, Thetford’s original typescript. I should qualify that by saying it is certainly not all Thetford’s original as it bears many indications of editing in the early portions and differs markedly from the Notes fragments we do have of those early pages. Some of the later parts of that manuscript may be Thetford’s original typescript. I personally doubt it because the overall quality and accuracy is higher than Thetford’s comments about his own typing lead one to suspect, but aside from that I know of no evidence by which we can rule out the possibility that some of it might be.
This USCO typescript is probably what Wapnick refers to in Absence as “Helen’s First Retyping.” It not only shows editing abridgements in comparison with the original Notes, it includes a significant amount of material not present in the Notes, material often flagged with the note “dictated without notes.” It would seem that while Helen was re-typing the original, she was editing it, both removing material and adding material which she felt was being dictated as she typed. We know from references in the Notes that Helen did not always read the whole of her Notes to Bill in the daily exercise whereby she read from her notebooks while Bill typed it up, and then he read it back to ensure accuracy. And we know from this “first retyping” that material was added later which is not in the Notes. In these two ways then we know that the first handwritten version, the second version which was typed by Bill, and the third version which was edited by Helen, all contain differences. The Notes have material missing from later versions and the later versions have later “dictation’ which is not present in the Notes or the Thetford typescript!
Version Four: HLC (Helen’s Second Retyping)
According to Robert Skutch, in Journey Without Distance, after the Text portion was finished but before the Workbook dictation began, Bill initiated the insertion of chapter and section breaks.. The Hugh Lynn Cayce typescript (the document recovered from ARE in 1999) has those chapter and section breaks. When compared with the earlier material, we can see that there are other changes. A great deal of the material in the earlier versions was removed in this stage.
Version Five: 1975-1996 FIP Editions
The final stage of substantive abridgement of ACIM is the best documented, since Kenneth Wapnick, who personally participated in it, has written at some length about his experiences in his book Absence from Felicity. Wapnick’s account is problematic in that most of what can be checked against independent sources in his account turns out to be party or wholly mistaken,. However, much is also partly correct and provides information we’d not otherwise have, although that information is not always as accurate or reliable as we’d like.
Wapnick indicates that the HLC was the only version he’d seen when he began, three months after first seeing it in May 1973, to edit it with Helen. In Absence Wapnick portrays himself as the one who was responsible, with Helen lending a hand reluctantly and ‘invariably falling asleep.’ In later comments Wapnick states that Helen did the editing and he just served as her “secretary.” It’s likely the case that both contributed significantly. Many observers can see traces of Helen in the final editing since overall, the pattern of introduction of error, re-writing things that didn’t need re-writing, and removing things that didn’t need removing is consistent with the differences between previous versions. Wapnick’s hand is visible in that certain “miracle-related” material which appears to both him but not to have bothered Helen and Bill, goes missing.
What is known to be different about this editing is not just the presence of Wapnick, but the absence of Thetford . His precise role in earlier editing is not clear. There is little way to tell how much of the editing was his doing and how much was Helen’s. Helen’s own comments are the best information we have. She says she wanted to change just about everything and Bill did not! She says she changed a great deal and then removed the changes, but while we can see massive evidence of changes, we see almost no evidence of anything being put back to an earlier form after having been changed. There are a few, a very few known cases of this however. The impression left is that most of the changes were Helen’s doing which is severely problematic since we have the clear scribed instructions from the Author that this work was to be left to Bill!
Bill certainly did not register any open or pubic objection to the sum total of the editing that I know of. If he had objections, he appears to have kept them private.
The Foundation for Inner Peace (FIP) has published three distinct editions of the 1975 Abridgement, with some minor modifications and corrections one to the next. The first, in August of 1975, was called the “Criswell Edition”. It consisted of some 300 copies of the “Nun’s Version” manuscript which were photocopied at 50%, resulting in a smaller book, but also type that was difficult to read. In June of 1976 FIP came out with its second edition, the three volume “Blue Book” which, although it was the second edition, was called the First Edition. It included the fourth volume, “Use of Terms” as an appendix to Volume Three. In 1996 further corrections were made along with the addition of an annotation system, in FIP’s third edition which it called The Second Edition. ACIM folks have trouble with accurate names!
As mentioned previously, it is known that there were “intermediate drafts” between some of the versions. We have direct evidence of that between the HLC and the FIP Abridgement because Wapnick says the early part was done twice. We have indirect evidence in the “First Re-typing” (aka Sub-Urtext) in that there are five different pagination systems and a good deal of visible cut and paste which suggests the likelihood of ‘intermediate drafts” is high.
Nomenclature
A major source of confusion for new students of ACIM is the huge variety of sometimes highly inaccurate names which are used to denote versions of ACIM and different editions of the 5 versions. I’ve tried to choose the most accurate, descriptive, and unambiguous names for each of the versions, though there are any number of other names I could have chosen and which are or have been used to refer to various versions.
I’ve finally resorted to numbering them in chronological order, one to five, earliest to most recent, to facilitate precise identification in the future, especially if any new drafts show up, but also for novices who are trying to keep track of other names … correlate any name with one of those numbers and it will all get much simpler! The single largest problem is the name “Urtext” which has been commonly used to refer both to version two and version three, resulting in confusion on an epic scale!
There is, in my mind, anything BUT certainty that we know of all important revisions or versions of ACIM prior to 1973. Future textual scholarship, especially once the FACIM archives are finally opened to scholarship, is very likely to be able to add considerably to the following list. This does represent, however, all the versions for which we have copies or strong witness evidence. The USCO material is listed as one “version” although its internal evidence suggests it may well consist of fragments of three or possibly even more different versions. This is the material presently known widely as the “Urtext”
This list includes all versions and editions of ACIM I’ve been able to identify.
The words “version” and “edition” can be and sometimes are used interchangeably. Here ‘version’ means a substantially unique rendition, and “edition” means one of possibly many different printings or copies of that version. A “version” will have one or more “editions” and an “edition” will have one or more copies.
(underlining indicates inaccessible or lost material not currently available to scholarship)
o Original Shorthand Notebooks
o Photocopy of Notebooks at USCO (where you can SEE but not copy it)
o Copy Possessed by Kenneth Wapnick (who won’t make it available)
o Copy Possessed by Tom Whitmore (who won’t make it available)
o Copy possessed by Endeavor Academy (who won’t make it available)
o Wapnick is believed to be in possession of it (no other copies known)
o Original Typescript (1968?) probably in the possession of Wapnick
o USCO Copy
o Scanned Image files publication (2000)
o MS Word OCR (2000)
o MS Word with HLC chapter and section breaks (2002)
o MFP Corrected Scanned Image files (2006)
o Sonship Gift 2007
o Original Typescript (1968? 1972?)
o Copy at A.R.E. (they claim to have lost it)
o Scanned Image Files of A.R.E. Photocopy publication (2000)
o MS Word OCR (1999)
o CIMS First Edition (2000)
o Thetford Foundation “Blue Sparkly” (2003)
o Corrected Scanned Image Files (2005)
o MFP Corrected HLC (This edition 2006)
o Criswell Edition (1975)
o FIP First Edition (1976)
o FIP Second Edition (1996)
o Electronic ACIM on CD (1997?)
* The name “Urtext” which simply means “original” text was first applied to Thetford’s original typescript. Later, after her death, Helen Schucman’s husband Louis asked Kenneth Wapnick to file 22 volumes of “Helen’s Private Papers” at the USCO. That material includes typescripts of all six volumes of ACIM labelled “Urtext of a Course in Miracles.” It was some months after release of the material in 2000 before it was recognized that little if any of it was, in fact, Thetford’s original typescript. Most of it shows signs of substantial editing and abridgement which would be consistent with Helen’s First Retyping. Thus it is that the name “Urtext” has been applied to two different versions, both the original Thetford typescript and what we think is really Helen’s first retyping of that. To address the confusion caused by using one name for two distinct documents, we’re calling the second, the “Sub-Urtext.”
This work would not and could not have come into existence without enormous contributions from a number of people. I don’t even know all their names. In particular gratitude is owed to those who discovered and published the earlier manuscripts of ACIM and those who did the Optical Character Recognition and retyping to generate the first computer files. My work began with those scanned images of the source material and the word processor files created from them.
Throughout the past years working with Helen Schucman’s and Bill Thetford’s typescripts, studying the editing they did, following their often obvious thought process, seeing the signs of the difficulties they had processing these huge documents without the benefit of computers, one cannot help but develop an enormous respect for them, their dedication, and their enormously significant efforts, however “human” and “imperfect” those turned out to be.
Special thanks goes out to Lee Flynn and Robert Perry whose feedback on specific problems and reflections on the overall direction of the project have served me as constant guiding lights. I never would have started this without Lee’s technical wizardry showing me that it could be done. There would be many more errors without both their help in analyzing textual problems and Iambic Pentameter.
Deborah Maltman’s unstinting support for the idea of an accurate copy of the Course and her many hours of proofing, scanning page after page for errors, advanced the completion date of this phase of the project significantly.
Gerald Merrick’s encyclopedic grasp of grammar has been extraordinarily helpful in sorting out the “subjunctive mood” passages.
This material could use more proofreading. I’d like to give it all at least one more pass. However, on the last pass we found very few mistakes and those were of a very minor nature. There are almost certainly some left. Our sense is that it is better now to release this material and get on with the next phases, the Workbook and the earlier Sub-Urtext material than to delay publication to find that last misplaced comma! As more eyes read the material, those last lingering little problems will come to light.
While the quality and accuracy of this material has benefited enormously from the contributions of others, responsibility for any flaws is my own. In the end the final decisions on what to change or not change, and finally when to declare it “done” were my own.
This work is not perfect and it is not finished. I’d love to take the months needed to footnote all the Biblical quotations, for instance. This and many other “features” will be considered for future editions but the release of this one, which, for all its faults is the most accurate edition of ACIM yet to be published, can be delayed no longer!
Doug Thompson † August 2006 † Guelph, Ontario
This edition of the HLC or Hugh Lynn Cayce Version (aka “JCIM” or Jesus’ Course in Miracles) version is the first part of a much larger project intended to provide accurate, machine-readable transcriptions of all extant ACIM primary source materials with concordances.
The ultimate goal of this project is to compare all instances of variant readings between all versions and determine which differences are genuine “corrections” and which are editorial mistakes. The result will be a “new version” which is as authentic to the original dictation of the Author as possible. This edition is not that, it is only the first of several necessary tools without which that undertaking cannot begin. It is an accurate copy of the photocopy discovered at the A.R.E. Library in November of 1999. It contains some additional material, which is fully footnoted, which we believe was inadvertently left out and it contains some corrections of spelling, grammar, and punctuation errors. Except for the most trivial of spelling and punctuation corrections, all changes from the HLC manuscript are footnoted.
The first phase of “processing” a manuscript on paper is sometimes called “paper capture”. It can be done by manual copy typing or scanning to optical character recognition (OCR) software. Shortly after this manuscript was discovered, this process was undertaken and a computer text file of the material was available within weeks. However that document was not sufficiently proofread and contained several hundred typos. While most were minor and many were obvious, some were considerably more serious.
When an even earlier version of the Text volume, the so-called “Urtext” was released on the net in late 2000, it was similarly processed with an output quality suffering similar problems. We now have two pre-publication manuscripts for the Text, the HLC and what is often mistakenly called the “Urtext” which we are calling the “Sub-Urtext.” For the Workbook, Manual, Use of Terms, Psychotherapy and Song of Prayer, we have only the single “Sub-Urtext” manuscript. None of these are widely thought to be the original “Urtext” or Thetford’s original typescript. However, it is possible that some portions of these “Urtext” documents may be Thetford’s first typescript. Prior to the genuine Urtext there is of course the Notes, Helen’s shorthand notebooks. There may also be additional manuscripts representing portions of the text which appears to have been re-worked many times between re-typings of the complete volume.
Eventually it is likely that all these documents will be released. When they become available they too will be “captured” to machine readable form.
Once “captured,” the material must be proof-read because the “capture” process is much less than 100% accurate, especially when our “source” document is third or fourth generation photocopy of an original made with an ink-ribbon typewriter. Proof-reading is not complicated, but it is tedious, time-consuming and exacting work. The traditional process is to have one person read aloud from the copy while another follows along on the original, noting any differences. With the aid of computers, we can use a voice synthesizer to “read” the copy aloud, and in many ways this is preferable because humans often “know” what is supposed to be there and fail to notice subtle spelling mistakes. Computers are too dumb to skip over mistakes like that! This is what we did for the HLC.
Even with the help of computers, no single proofreading pass of a large document ever catches 100% of the errors. In fact, if we catch 90% we think we’ve done well. The only way to check is to proof it again, and again, and again until one stops finding mistakes.
After ten passes we were no longer finding mistakes. Some mistakes, such as capitalization, presented a major issue in the HLC because capitalization is used for emphasis so often. There were hundreds of capitalization capture errors in the version released in 2000. These can only be caught by eye, however, comparing the two documents side by side. To do this the “copy” must be paginated identically to the manuscript and printed out and bound with the manuscript pages, so the two pages can be examined and compared side by side, line by line.
In addition to discrepancies between the HLC manuscript and the digital copy, there are errors in the HLC itself. Some of these are rather simple and obvious spelling and punctuation errors, but we found other errors as well. In some cases there is bad grammar, and in others obviously inadvertent omissions of a word or a phrase or a sentence or even, in one case, an entire page. To find all of these the HLC must be compared line-by-line with its predecessor, the Sub-Urtext. We have not done this. We have only compared the HLC to earlier and later versions when there appeared to our eyes or ears some problem with the HLC itself. The “corrections” which are included in this edition arose in that way, and not in a thorough proofing of the HLC against any other version. That work is still to be done and there is little doubt that many more errors and omissions will show up when it is.
What we have here then is a highly accurate transcript of the HLC manuscript with some errors in the manuscript itself being flagged and/or corrected. Where we were aware of mistakes, it seemed to us irresponsible not to inform the reader of the presence of a possible error, or correct it if it was completely obvious that it was an error.
Except for the most trivial and obvious of typos relating to spelling and punctuation, all changes or corrections we’ve made have been footnoted so that the reader can be sure precisely where this text deviates from the manuscript, and why it does so. Our goal was not to ‘change’ the HLC but simply to “accurately transcribe it.”
In dealing with discrepancies between the HLC and the Sub-Urtext we did not change anything which appeared to be an intentional change by the previous editors. Only where there was a powerful case that the discrepancies were inadvertent did we consider a change. Even then we sometimes just footnoted the perceived problem and left the text unchanged. Only where there was no discernible probability of the change being intentional did we actually “correct” the HLC, and even there we footnoted all but the most obvious and trivial typos.
The reason for footnoting is quite simple. Our list of “errors to be fixed” was initially much larger than it is currently. As each one was reviewed repeatedly by a number of people, it became apparent that in many cases the ‘error’ was in our understanding of the text, and not in the text itself. As we look at the changes previous editors made, we often believe we’re seeing the same thing, that they made changes based on a misreading of the material at times, just as we did. While we’ve removed all such changes we were aware of, we are not claiming that any supernatural power guided every keystroke in this document, nor that our decisions are in any way infallible. It is likely, in my view, that future scholarship, especially if informed by the original Urtext and Notes, will find that some changes we’ve made need to be ‘unmade’ and that the error, again, wasn’t in the text of the HLC, but in our understanding of it. Through such evaluation, any errors we’ve made are likely to come to light and be corrected.
I’m repeating myself here because I wish to be unambiguously and precisely clear about what we did and what we didn’t do and what this edition represents.
Because our underlying goal was the production of a Concordance, we needed a reference system suitable for a Concordance and we needed to standardize spelling conventions. Where multiple spellings of a word are used or allowed, we’ve standardized this edition to a single variant of possible spellings. The list of words which we’ve modified appears later.
The need for the “early manuscripts” to be published became obvious within hours of the HLC being re-discovered in 1999. The differences between it and the later FIP First Edition which was mistakenly advertised as “virtually unchanged” are very great in the early chapters. While some of these are clearly corrections, many, many others are clearly inadvertent errors. Where changes are deliberate, in some cases those changes are exceedingly questionable and the possibility of editorial error cannot be discounted.
It must be remembered that at no point after the original Thetford Typescript and prior to 1996 did the “editing” of ACIM involve any proofreading or checking the “current version” against any but the immediately preceding one. Thus any errors which weren’t obvious, and several which actually were obvious, were preserved into all later versions. The result is that the more they edited it, the worse it got. More new errors were introduced in each recopying and most of the extant errors went uncorrected.
In order to discover “what ACIM really says” we must then, where there are variant readings, correct the editorial mistakes while preserving the editorial corrections. The only way to do this is to track every change the editors made at every stage, “undo” those which are obvious mistakes, preserve those which are corrections, and carefully reconsider those changes which are not obviously either corrections or corruptions. Just finding the differences, never mind evaluating them, is a huge task, and it’s much more difficult in the absence of accurate machine-readable copies. Thus the first step in a “thorough proofing” and correction of ACIM is the preparation of precisely accurate copies of each version of ACIM. With those in hand, computers can help us greatly in identifying all the changes.
The attempt here is not to “replace” any other version of ACIM nor is it to suggest that this one is without mistakes! It is simply to offer to the world, for the first time, an accurate, fully proofed edition of the HLC for those who are interested in such along with a Concordance which greatly facilitates textual research.
The HLC version has some advantages over later versions of AC