231: New Age Bible, Postmodern Novel (w/ Sheila Heti)
Rapid-response electoral punditry is not our lane. So, while we gather our feelings and thoughts, Matthew hosts novelist Sheila Heti for a discussion of her encounter with A Course in Miracles, and what she discovered when she investigated its origin story for Harper’s Magazine.
Was Helen Schucman, the book’s “scribe”, mentally ill? Was she unduly influenced by her boss at Columbia Medical School, William Thetford, who once worked for the CIA’s MKUltra programme, and with whom she was clearly in love, even though he was gay? Were they dropping acid on assignment from Langley? Why was the initial dictation of the book so radically altered by its first editors? Why did Helen Schucman curse A Course in Miracles so soon after publication? Why did she keep writing trite poems to Jesus before dying in bitterness?
Heti was the ideal gumshoe for this project, because as a novelist all-too-familiar with internal voices and the feeling of “channeling,” she was able to feel her way into Helen’s life. Matthew asks her what she found.
Show Notes
The New Age Bible — Sheila Heti
Sheila Heti — website
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This is episode 231, and it's called New Age Bible Postmodern Novel with special guest Sheila Hetty.
I'm recording this intro on Wednesday morning in the bleak aftermath of the election news.
In our final editorial discussions before voting day, we decided ahead of time that it was best not to rush into electoral analysis, especially given the high chance of uncertainty and legal chaos.
Now, that's not happening because Harris lost squarely.
But for me, that makes our choice to wait even more sound because I think it'll take a moment to really consider how best to focus our efforts next so as to bring valuable analysis and perhaps even hope.
And so I'm on my own today with an episode not directly related to the election, while we take that needed space, and Derek and Julian will be back on board next week.
Today what I've got is what I hope to be a quiet and thoughtful break from it all, because my fellow Torontonian, the novelist Sheila Hetty, is joining me to discuss her brilliant investigation of A Course in Miracles, published in Harper's Magazine this past August.
Now, this episode won't directly help anyone understand the fallout from this terrible week, but I think it will help as a reflection on some of the basic puzzles of conspirituality that were part of the road by which we got here.
How, despite all of the defenses of our rational age, our cultures are still vulnerable to spiritualized fever dreams.
When we are disenchanted, we can hallucinate the voices of ancient certainty.
We can reach for a mirage of salvation, and without realizing its cruelty, we can lose all perspective and connection with others along the way.
And that is part of the story of Helen Schuchman, the so-called scribe of A Course in Miracles, who said she was channeling Jesus.
Now, before Sheila joins me, I'm going to give a little background to start off.
Many of you are aware that for three years, I lived in a cult in rural Wisconsin.
It was called Endeavor Academy.
And the leader, the late Charles Anderson, preached to us every day about the glory of A Course in Miracles.
And like the book itself, he was brilliant, repetitive, boring, grandiose, and quite frequently insane.
Now, I'd come to the course through a friend of mine in Vermont.
I was in my late 20s.
He was maybe 15 years older than me, and he was kind of a mentor to me during the years in which I'd stalled out on my writing career.
He ran a retreat center out of an old converted barn.
I had never known anyone so resourceful and industrious.
And when I stayed there doing odd jobs for him, I would join him and his other hired help in the hilltop meditation gazebo every morning before we went out to the gardens or the forest to work.
So, I'd published two novels back in Toronto, and I just didn't know what to do next.
I had drifted from waiting tables to overnight radio DJ to now farmhand.
But I knew there was a deep emptiness in me that no ordinary thing would fill.
The world seemed senseless, and my imagination had reached its limit in being able to protect or distract or entrance me.
Now one day, we were standing at the edge of his spring-fed swimming hole, and I was gazing at the dark water and screwing up my courage to jump.
I asked him, what is fear?
Fear is the absence of love, he said.
And then he jumped in with a whoop.
And I felt this rush of joy, and I jumped in too.
Later, I asked him if he had made up that sentence, and he shook his head and handed me a copy of A Course in Miracles, and he said, it comes from here.
Reading that book was like diving into that cold, still swimming hole, but also being able to breathe and see underwater, discovering some untouched part of myself.
I felt immense peace and expansiveness.
The rhythm was hypnotic, the voice was certain, and the arguments seemed sublime.
And for the first time in my life, I felt fully relieved of my personality, my resentments and grievances, neurotic worries, hopeless desires.
It was all washed away as I filled up with forgiveness.
After a while, I asked my friend what I could do to learn more about this book.
And he told me that I could check out Endeavor Academy if I felt called.
He had been there three years before.
It's not for everyone, he said, but you will have a full experience of the course there.
Looking back, I have to kind of impotently shake my fist in my friend's direction, but also thank him, because that nudge towards the Midwest really catalyzed my eventual realization that this book could lead to some terrible places.
So my initial experience of the book was euphoric, but like a drug, those effects wore off.
And then my comedown was accelerated by the obvious deceptions and toxicities of the cult, which deployed the most punitive parts of the text to discipline its members.
For instance, the book teaches that any mental or bodily disturbance you experience is caused by your rejection or denial of God.
Now, in a cult, that cashes out to senior members abusing or exploiting younger members and then saying their protests are a denial of God.
So the real nuts-and-bolts, solipsistic vulnerability of the text can really be spotlighted in certain communities of practice.
And in a way, I was lucky because the intensity of Endeavor Academy limited this addiction that I developed.
I've known some people, without the benefits of such a crucible, to continue on with that text for years, wondering why it feels increasingly strange, and then blaming themselves for their growing sense of despair.
All of this happened to me 25 years ago.
And now, here's a record scratch moment.
Three years ago, Toronto-based novelist Sheila Hetty's father died.
And on the cusp of a depression and wondering whether she would ever write another novel, she picked up A Course in Miracles and felt a strange euphoria come over her as she read it.
So, Sheila and I share a city, a profession, we're close in age, and we ran in parallel writing circles.
I remembered her from readings and lecture events that she hosted.
And in our correspondence before recording, she said that my name was familiar to her as well.
So, with just a few degrees of separation between us, we both fell headfirst into a spiritual rabbit hole for similar desperate and depressive reasons related to our creativity.
But Hetty was luckier.
I hope I can say that.
She was older by 20 years than when I first got hooked.
She was vastly more accomplished than I was as a writer, and still is.
She's more in command of her inner voice, although, as we'll see, command might not be the best word.
And her induction into the book was not complicated by a cult.
But then, a job accelerated her disillusionment with the text.
Because Harper's Magazine contracted her via a grant through the Templeton Foundation to write an article, and she used that grant to investigate the strange origins of this book.
A text purported to be spoken by the voice of Jesus and channeled through a middle-aged New Yorker Jewish psychologist named Helen Shookman, starting in 1965.
And before long, as Hedy dove into the history and personalities that constellated around this text, the spell was broken.
Now, this or any real investigation of A Course in Miracles has been a long, long time in coming.
As Hedy lays out in her masterful tapestry of research, memoir, and analysis, this best-selling book, translated into dozens of languages, is dubbed the New Age Bible, and it serves as the scriptural backbone for the careers of multiple self-help and it serves as the scriptural backbone for the careers of multiple self-help messiahs But it has a very strange origin story.
Was Helen Shookman mentally ill?
Was she unduly influenced by her boss at Columbia Medical School, William Thetford, who once worked for the CIA's MKUltra program and with whom she was clearly in love even though he was gay?
Were they dropping acid on assignment from Langley?
Was Helen hypnotically suggestible, given to voluntary or involuntary trances?
Why are huge chunks of this book written in iambic pentameter?
And why was the initial dictation of the book so radically altered by its first editors?
Why did Helen Schuchman curse A Course in Miracles so soon after publication?
And why did she keep writing trite poems to Jesus before dying in bitterness?
I'm going to let you read Hedy's gorgeous essay to find out where she lands on these questions.
In fact, you might want to hit pause after this intro and read the piece if you feel you need more of a 101 on the book and its story, because I'm not going to make her go back to ground zero in this interview.
Because what I really wanted to explore was the big picture question of why so many people are captivated by this strange book.
And that meant asking her about the personal pull she felt towards A Course in Miracles, and what that had to do with her intuitions about inner voices, her struggles with art, how novel writing is itself a form of channeling that allows us to imagine alternate worlds and agencies.
What did it feel like, as a novelist, to imagine having Jesus dictate the wisdom of the ages?
And I wanted to ask Hetty about the transition between the euphoria she felt at first reading and the sense of malaise that gathered not only as she got clearer on the book's dubious production, but also as the text and its lessons began to feel odd, hackneyed, and hostile.
In some ways, this is a peak convergence of some conspirituality questions I've been chewing on for many years.
What draws us in when we are spiritually hungry?
What happens when a teaching promises us the world but then colonizes our minds?
What do we do when it betrays us?
Is it possible for us to seek a gentler mysticism?
Would we all just be better off being artists?
So, after a short break, I'll be back with my conversation with Sheila Hetty.
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Sheila Hetty, welcome to Conspirituality Podcast.
Thank you.
One thing that we know from the cult studies world is that people are attracted to these groups and these ideas and these books during periods of personal vulnerability.
You recount picking up this book shortly after your father died.
I wanted to start by asking you, how did the book interact with your grief?
It's a good question.
So this would have been 2018.
And I think that, well, basically, when my father died, it was a very spiritual kind of experience.
I felt like I understood that in some way death was not real, nothing to be afraid of.
It was a very profound, unexpected kind of moment, the moment of his death.
I was right there with him.
And I think after that, I was curious to see if there was any reflection of that in books.
Anything that I could use in the world of literature to understand This new feeling I had about death.
And I don't remember why I had A Course in Miracles on my bookshelf.
Maybe it came in the mail.
Maybe I ordered it on Amazon.
I can't remember where I first heard about it, but I did start reading it probably a few weeks after.
And it confirmed what I felt that So much of our perception of life and death is an illusion.
Maybe death is not quite real.
There was a lot in there that felt exactly like what I was looking for and reassured me.
And then...
It didn't take long though, only about a week or two for me to feel like I wanted to put it away and not keep reading it.
It felt almost too certain.
I felt like what I was looking for was not something that had all the answers, but would sort of like live with me with my questions.
And so I put it away.
And then a few years later, Harper's Magazine asked me to write a piece for them I started thinking about that book again and remembering it, and I decided I wanted to look closer at why it had such a positive effect on me at first, why it felt so reassuring at first, but then why it quickly felt like something that I didn't really want to touch, I didn't want to go deeper with.
You really describe in the article almost euphoric feelings in that sort of honeymoon confirmation stage.
Even though you say it was hard to retain the substance of the text, like you would read it and it would be hard to remember what it actually said, and that's something we can return to.
Can you describe that experience through bodily sensations for us?
What did walking around for that week and being you feel like at that time?
Yeah, well, when I picked up the book again for the second time to write the article, which was about two years ago, I got that same feeling that I had the first time.
And it was a feeling of...
I wouldn't have described it this way at the time, but in retrospect, I would say it was a feeling of supreme specialness, a feeling of being charged with...
With everything about my life being charged with destiny and meaning and purpose and sort of inexplicable purpose, like not a purpose that I knew like, okay, my purpose is to write books or to like be nice to other people, but something much more cosmic and much more, I guess, connected to some like divine plan.
And it was exciting.
Like I remember like walking, I live in downtown Toronto.
I remember walking through a park with my dog and just feeling like The sunlight, the dog, myself just had this aura of specialness and purpose and mystery and it felt very exciting.
I was part of some kind of story that I didn't know where it was going.
It was a great feeling and I was feeling pretty unhappy at that time and kind of depressed and kind of lost.
I'm in my mid-late 40s, you start asking yourself questions about your life at that time and it seemed to answer all those questions somehow just on a very visceral level.
It sounds also like a level that has a kind of thin layer to it and might not be that stable.
Ultimately, it proved to be not very stable and pretty thin.
I mean, you know, I didn't keep going with it.
I started to feel like alienated from the book again within a couple of weeks.
And so, yeah, it didn't reward like, for me, more study, more thought, more conversations with friends.
It kind of all started to sort of fray at the edges.
Yeah.
So, Harper's gives you this sort of open-ended assignment, and this is what you choose.
And I'm thinking about how serendipitous it is for you to wind up being an investigator of this book, because...
Your own work and style and struggles in fiction have a lot of parallels that you draw on.
And close to the top of the article, you quote the text of the book where, you know, the alleged voice of Jesus says, And I have always heard that as a kind of artist's lament, you know?
Like, what am I actually doing?
What is this worth?
And so I wonder if part of the initial attraction was that on the content level, A Course in Miracles posed this moment This basic challenge, this question, and perhaps a temporary relief from your own identity as an artist who has to create meaning.
Yeah, that's a perfect way of putting it.
I mean, there is something vain about ambition, and it did kind of release me of this feeling that, yeah, I had to be ambitious and make things in the world and do certain things that I'd already decided that I was going to do, that I'd already decided was important.
And on one level, I think ultimately there's some truth to that.
I think it's not the wrong kind of wisdom to bring into your life.
But on another level, it's what are you replacing it with?
In my case, I felt like at a certain point I was just replacing it with kind of blissful feelings that had no connection to other people.
Yeah.
You know, that he alienated other people.
Well, that's a clue, right?
Like, you feel really great and everybody's giving the side eye.
Yeah, exactly.
And I think that for some people, that's a clue that they're on the right track and everyone else is on the wrong track.
Yes, exactly.
Right.
I respect and love the people I'm closest to and so...
My intuition is always like maybe I should question myself, not every single person I've chosen over 40 plus years to keep in my life.
In my preamble, I'm mentioning something about how I think you were luckier than I was with this particular book because I think you had a stronger network of friends that could reflect back to you.
Hey, where are you?
Where are you going?
I had one friend like that, but it wasn't quite enough.
Yeah, well, my boyfriend would make fun of me every time I picked up the book, so it's very hard to, like, fall with total trust into something like that if you're right by your side every day is somebody saying, like, what on earth are you reading?
You know, the other reason why you are really suited to investigate a channeled text is that, like, you're famously always constantly experimenting with forms of listening and transcribing, like, the other, the mysterious inner voice.
So, you know, writing fiction as it comes from a kind of trance state.
Like in motherhood, there are long dialogues about existence and free will that the narrator undertakes with flipped coins that give yes or no answers.
And then, you know, you've described the alphabetical diaries as a project of trying to discover the hidden message of who you actually are by alphabetizing and therefore defamiliarizing the sentences from tens of thousands of diary pages.
And now you've written stories most recently derived from dialogues with an AI chatbot named Alice.
So then you come across this book and this story of Helen Shookman that, you know, where she's taking dictation from Jesus.
Did that resonate? - Yeah, it resonated and also made me feel very inferior You know, it's one thing to flip a coin and get a yes or no answer and another thing to hear the voice of Jesus in your head.
I mean, both of them are a kind of channeling, but one feels like you're channeling randomness.
And the other feels like you're channeling the voice of a true spiritual leader, historically.
So I did feel a little jealous.
I was like, well, how can I get the voice of Jesus to come into my work?
And in some sense, when you're an artist, you do feel like there is some...
Greater wisdom that you can tap into at moments of, you know, very...
When you're working really well, it doesn't happen all the time, but you do feel like, you know, the writing is happening without your conscious, you know, deliberate control.
And that's a terrific feeling.
It's part of the reason why it's fun to do, to make, you know, any kind of art, I think.
But yeah, I think I was just like, because of my own experience of...
I didn't immediately dismiss her claim that she was hearing some kind of voice or that she was channeling the voice of what she called later, what she called Jesus, I think.
I thought maybe there's something naive.
She's not an artist in the way that a lot of people I know are artists.
She was a psychologist and she didn't make any novels or paintings or anything like that before she heard the voice of Jesus.
And I thought maybe this is just naivety to say that it's Jesus.
Like if she was in a circle of artists, she might have just said it's something else.
Yeah.
But I didn't feel the experience of feeling like she was being spoken to by some other voice.
Well, she was ambivalent around coming to naming the voice at one point, right?
Yeah, exactly.
And so I thought maybe that was just a wrong turn, but the fact that she didn't seem to explain the voice as coming from her own subconscious when she was somebody who had studied Freud, like...
That's a little weird.
Incredible.
Incredible.
Right.
Yeah.
So I don't know.
I was just kind of mystified and curious and like, who was this woman and why did she choose to narrate the story in this way?
And maybe she didn't narrate the story in this way.
Maybe it was narrated post, you know, after the fact by somebody else to make it seem, make the text seem more important than it might otherwise seem.
Well, we'll get to that intrigue in a moment, but I just want to circle back to this difference between, you know, an aleatory or by chance channeling process and then the feeling that you're hearing the voice of Jesus or you come to recognize it as the voice of Jesus.
I think I get, maybe I'm wrong, but in your work there's a wish for a kind of Freedom and co-creation with chance.
But Helen's Jesus really just isn't like that.
He promises freedom, but that's not what he delivers.
Yeah, and it's also not clear where the collaboration between Jesus and Helen lay.
For me, I have my voice in with the coins, or I have my voice in with Alice.
But with The Course in Miracles, it's not Helen's voice at all.
There's really, I mean, unless it's completely Helen's voice, but there's no sense of a dialogue.
I think in the Ur text, the original text that was edited, there's a little bit more sense of a dialogue, but then they edited that out.
So it just does seem like, here's Jesus, he's speaking through Helen, and Helen is a very neutral kind of filter, which isn't, I think, at all the case in the kind of writing that I do.
I think my questions to the coins or to Alice are a huge part of the meaning of what the coins and Alice say.
Like, I have questions and they're answering them.
Whereas, and I think that may have been true of Helen too, but she doesn't present it that way.
She presents it as here's this universal wisdom speaking to everybody, not just speaking to her or her and Bill.
And I'm invisible.
- Yes. - And I'm invisible.
And not just do I, you know, it's hard to find who she is and maybe that says something about her eventual decline or the feeling that she might have at the end of her life that she was just totally used by this process, like there's nothing left of her, right?
Like she didn't get, what did she get back from it?
I don't get any sense that she's grateful for the experience.
But not only is it hard to see who she is, but she also takes on another affect, You're asking, where's her contribution or where's her collaboration?
Well, she provides this kind of engine of Shakespearean rhythm in her fascination with iambic pentameter.
And that's how two-thirds of the book ends up being written.
And so it's like she has some skill that ends up getting used by something else.
And something that's curious to me is also that sometimes she says that she hears the words, and sometimes she says that she hears a vibration or she senses a vibration, which means that she would be making up the words.
Yes.
So there's no real clarity on that.
You know, you were at a colloquium on the article at Yale University, and I listened to a recording of it.
I don't think it's been released.
But I had to, like, laugh out loud when you admitted that you hadn't read the whole 1300-page book because it was long and boring and, like, nonsense.
And I have to say, you got off easy because in the group that I was in, I was actually tasked with doing an audiobook version of the book.
Yeah.
And it's kind of funny because I would actually fall asleep while reading it, which was, I think, very indicative.
But you didn't start with this sense of it being boring and nonsensical.
And likewise, when Helen first read her shorthand notes that she was taking this sort of ethereal dictation from to William Thetford, he told her that it was extraordinarily beautiful.
But part of you going sour on the book...
Itself was wrapped up in learning about Helen.
And then apart from that, even there's this point at which the prose that had been so captivating, suddenly, as you describe it turned to a kind of repetitiveness and circularity, it became pedantic and fuzzy and hard to retain.
What was that like?
I was looking over the text again last night to try to remind myself what it was I felt.
And I'll just read you one little passage from early on.
It says, Miracles enable you to heal the sick and raise the dead because you made sickness and death yourself and can therefore abolish both.
You are a miracle capable of creating in the likeness of your creator.
Everything else is your own nightmare and does not exist.
Only the creations of light are real.
So if you're feeling receptive, that's kind of exciting and beautiful and wow, like I made death?
You know, and then once you start to feel a little skeptical, you just say, what am I supposed to do with this?
What does it mean I can abolish death?
you know, what does it mean that everything that I experienced is my own nightmare?
Like there's something a little bit hostile about it to the human, um, and kind of condemning.
And even though the whole book is about forgiveness, it actually puts the whole weight of anyone's troubles or experience in life on themselves.
Um, it's very apolitical that way.
It's very, um, judgmental and it's very frustrating.
Like, okay, so everything is my own nightmare.
Like, what am I supposed to do about that?
There's, and I think what you're supposed to do about that is just read the book forever.
And, and I don't know, um, um, I just start to find it kind of frustrating.
Okay, so let me pretend to be a pedantic course teacher and inform you, Sheila, that no, you're not supposed to read the book forever.
You're supposed to turn to the back and do the lessons.
And it might take you a year.
Well, it will take you a year to get through all 365.
And it might take you five years to really let them sink in.
But...
The first part of the lesson book will allow you to understand that this hostile sort of interpretation of your own life and your responsibility for everything is really just sort of like, you know, opening the gateway to realizing that your brain, your mind, your soul can relax into creating a new, different type of reality.
That when that first lesson is, you I see means anything.
You're actually erasing the world of perceptions and judgments that you have, and that's going to allow Jesus to sort of overwrite a new kind of system upon you.
So that's what they would tell you.
They would say that, you know, you didn't get far enough, Sheila, you shouldn't have written that article because you really don't know what you're talking about when it comes to Jesus and the Course.
Yeah, I think that's probably true.
Like, I didn't read a whole book.
I didn't do a year of the exercise before writing, you know.
I mean, I just – but when I learned about Bill, like, I just couldn't.
I mean, we'll get to that.
But I don't know.
There's also something about it that's really – That while it's supposed to enhance the love between you and everyone around you, actually kind of disappears everyone around you.
And I just find that very dangerous.
And also, it's just like not any religious tradition that I know of where it says everything that everyone is doing around you, you're making it up, you know?
Yeah, right.
Why would you help anybody in that worldview?
Yeah.
It's a very strange form.
It can be, I think for some people, a very strange form of nihilism posing as empathy.
And that's really confusing to try to sort out.
And solipsism posing as wisdom.
Okay, well, you brought up Bill again.
You have this plot twist in your article at the point at which you start getting suspicious of Bill Thetford's connections to the CIA via MKUltra.
And I just have to tell you that I've been thinking about this for about 20 years and wondering when somebody was going to have the resources to dig into it.
And so you take it a certain, you know, length of distance, wondering just how much control he's exerting over the whole process of dictation and writing things down.
You even wonder at one point whether he might have dosed Helen with LSD during the time of writing.
And then cutting back the other way, you wonder whether Helen had sustained the auditory hallucinations in order to continue to have a reason to speak intimately with Bill every day because she was secretly in love with him.
Now, ultimately, you know, there's not enough data around to answer those questions, but I think the image that you use is that you come up to the edge of a big kind of fire pit and you can recognize that the ashes of all of the files of MKUltra are sort of, you know, just sitting there smoldering.
And we're not going to know.
But how do you feel now about those loose ends?
I don't know.
I really think it is a mystery.
How is this book written?
What were the motivations behind writing it?
How much of the motivation was the CIA's?
How much of it was Bill's?
How much of it was Helen's?
How much of it was Jesus's?
I'm still slightly open to the idea that maybe Jesus did speak through Helen.
I don't know the world in such great detail that I can say for sure that's not what happened.
I think there are all sorts of beautiful, mystical things that happen through people.
But the fact that her main collaborator was part of MKUltra and that they were working together on a lot of stuff for the CIA when they were both at Columbia, I couldn't find an answer to how this thing had really come about.
So many of the CIA's files at that time had been destroyed.
No one's going to know the answer.
I talked to Tam Morgan, who is the current publisher, whose mother, Judith Skutchwitson, was the original publisher of it.
She didn't really tell me anything that helped.
And I think that there's probably secrecy around it.
I think not only is there secrecy, but maybe no one but Helen and Bill knew.
I don't think it really matters.
I think what matters in the case of a spiritual text is the effect it has on people's lives.
I'm interested in how it was made because I make things, but I don't think that how it was made is the real way to evaluate this text.
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Yeah.
about how that story unfolded really were motivated by this feeling that if there was a part of the MPA Ultra program that was about derailing progressive politics in the post-60s era, that it would be very valuable to attract liberals, liberal centrists, and progressives to a text that told them to do nothing,
Except sit on their asses and think about how they were one with God.
And that's a very paranoid thought.
I think that there's merit in exploring why I want to or I'm interested in seeing what connections are there.
But I think what's much more plausible is that the entire culture is turning towards the kind of neoliberal political erasure of agency and And that the course kind of emerges in conjunction with that, and that's why it's popular, right?
It's not that, you know, one thing spurred the other, or there's some sort of causal link, but that the book is reflecting cultural developments in some way.
Yeah, that's exactly right.
Like, if this book had been written and nobody dreaded it, then who cares?
But the fact that so many people take it up is what's interesting.
And for me, it tracks a kind of, or it extends a lineage down into the character and the behaviors and the words of somebody like Marianne Williamson, who ends up influencing democratic politics at a fairly impactful level, but not Entirely in a bad way, in my opinion.
So I have this kind of geopolitical story that I've been chewing on.
And I was actually grateful to get that image of the ashes of the files and to say, you know what, I'm okay to move on.
Because there's something about the paranoia about how it all came together that I think is more important.
And that's what I want to ask you next, which is that one commenter at that Yale event, I think, hit the nail on the head by describing this flip between the euphoria that some people experience while reading A Course in Miracles and the paranoia that they might hit the nail on the head by describing this flip between the euphoria that some people experience while reading A Course in Miracles
And the commenter said that this seems to be representative of the two sides of American religiosity.
You know, on our podcast, we call it conspirituality, you know, this combination of spiritual aspiration and like sort of dreadful fear.
And your article really tracks both sides of that.
And near the top of the interview, I asked you what that euphoria felt like, and you described walking through the park with your dog and, How do the feelings of suspicion that developed during the course of writing this investigation compare with those feelings of euphoria?
Yeah.
Well, I actually cut a bit from the article, I think I cut it, where I talk about that there's something very similar about the feeling of paranoia of this sort and spirituality of this sort, which is that in both cases, you are at the center of meaning.
Like your mind, the capacity of your mind is at the center.
And that's kind of exciting.
So I remember when I was starting to get into the MKUltra stuff, just spending time Hours and hours online, looking through CIA files, feeling like I was on the track of it.
I'm going to figure this out.
And the center of meaning is going to come from my ability to find the patterns.
And there's a kind of grandiosity in it, almost.
The same way there's a kind of grandiosity in that feeling that I had in the park, where I'm like, I'm at the center of this Or one of the centers of this great plan that the creator has, which may or may not be true, but still the feeling that I had, I had it very intensely reading the book.
And in both cases, you're important.
You're really important.
And I think that's what connects them.
And somehow, not only are you important, but if you keep down this path, you're going to break through to some Profound understanding that's going to sort of unlock everything.
Like, the whole time that I was, like, on the trail of MKUltra, like, it never occurred to me, like, well, maybe what you're going to find at the end is a solution to this tiny little puzzle, this tiny little question about this book.
It felt more like, and you're going to unlock the secrets to the universe, you know?
There's just, like, this...
I really resonate with that because as I was thinking and, you know, wondering about that connection and that particular...
I think a more sort of less invested journalist would just look at the question and say, well, either MKUltra was involved or it wasn't.
And if it was, then that tells us a little bit about what the government was interested in, but not much.
It doesn't explain why the book became so popular.
It doesn't explain how it got into Marianne Williamson's hands.
So, Yeah, there's this outsized sense of importance with regard to that particular question.
And I think that's at the heart of the conspiracist's desire, right?
Is that if you can answer one little question, you will be the son of God, actually.
You will be blessed and you will recognize that there is no death or something like that.
Yeah, absolutely.
Yeah, it's strange.
And you don't even see it happening.
It happens so gradually.
And then suddenly you're like, why am I spending all my time looking this up?
Like, what love does this have?
Anything that's going on in my life, you know?
Yeah.
Yeah, right.
Focus from 40 years old, who cares?
Well, okay, but isn't there something else here, too?
I think we're a little bit close in age.
There's something about trying to solve a mystery that was going on or unfolding when...
You and I were both six years old or whatever.
There's something historical about, oh, how did this generation happen?
How did things happen during my lifetime?
And I think that's at play, too, because I get this sense when I think about, and you do this beautiful job of sort of just visualizing Helen and Bill in the office together, and she's sort of leaned up against his desk or something like that.
And I have that picture too, and it's the picture of my parents' generation.
It's the picture of, well, how did I get here?
So those are some of the questions that I want to finish up with, because now I just want to talk more freely about imagination.
And to ask, as a novelist...
Which plot reveal would you find most satisfying if this rolled out as a novel?
So the first one I've already mentioned.
So The Course in Miracles was a CIA plot to depoliticize the left and create the foundation for a neoliberal spirituality of selfishness.
So that's number one.
Actually, there's not much of a story there, so you'd have to...
Fill that in.
But secondly, the readers of A Course in Miracles are eavesdroppers on a bizarre and captivating love triangle between Helen, Bill, and Jesus.
Third, Helen Shookman suffered from auditory hallucinations and realized too late in life that she could have gone into treatment instead of dressing them up in Shakespearean meter and Freudian vocabulary.
And fourth, Helen Shookman did authentically hear the voice of Jesus, but he unfortunately turned out to be a cranky, patronizing, and controlling asshole.
Yeah.
I mean, you're the one who writes novels with coin flips, so maybe none of these really work, but which one do you think holds most promise?
Honestly, I think the last.
If you believe that Jesus can talk through people and...
I mean, I think that that's not...
Again, I think that's really close to what art is.
I think what art is, is a human channeling a kind of...
Deeper wisdom that's in the culture that's eternal but of the moment and that helps people in some way and that sort of fills in some of the spiritual void that we go around with.
I think there is truth to that.
I think if Helen had thought of it as art that she was making rather than, as I said, kind of We're good to go.
I need to be its editor.
Like I need to make this a 200 page book and keep in the best of it.
Because, because the fact that they didn't, that's, I mean, apart from a little bit of editing at the beginning, the fact that they left it to be a 1300 page book is too reverent towards the process.
I think on some level, maybe because she was hypnotized or maybe because she's whatever psychological stuff was going on with her, because she believed it was the literal voice of Jesus, she didn't want to cut.
If she had understood that maybe she was an artist after all and she could shape this and make it something beautiful and helpful and take out some of the absurdity that...
That goes too far.
I think it could have been maybe a really wonderful text that wouldn't have also hurt people the way that I know that it has.
And that the CIA stuff wouldn't have mattered if they had understood it so much.
I just think the CIA stuff matters more because the claim that they make is so outlandish.
And so you want to balance it with something else.
Somebody should have been there, a fifth person that was part of that whole group sort of saying, like, let's try to think of this as a work of art and not as the literal voice of Jesus.
It does kind of make me imagine what it would be like if you and I and our present personalities had been in that friend group or something like that.
And we could have just said that around the dinner table.
Yeah.
Because I think that one of the things that's happening with the 1300 pages is not just an overweening sense of reverence or piety or a sense that, like, oh, this...
because it came from Jesus is so important.
It also betrays a kind of subconscious sadism.
It overwhelms readers.
Like one of the reasons that people stick with it for 10 years or 20 years, I think, is because it's 1300 pages.
And they feel like, and they're told often by their colleagues that they're not understanding it fully, that they have to read more deeply, that they have to do the lessons again, that they have to, you know, the lessons will make the text sort of unpack.
And if you haven't read the lessons fully, or if they didn't work, then you go to the manual for teachers.
And then there's all of the ephemera that's around it.
and then, you know, you might want to listen to Ken Wapnick's old lectures, because he really gets into it.
It's like...
It becomes its own industry out of that sort of lack of artistic appreciation, which would just take an editorial pencil to it and say, what's the real thing here?
What's the real heart?
What's the real heart of it?
And do you think there's something kind of authoritarian about it being so long and so...
Yeah, I do.
Not consciously.
Not consciously.
I think that anybody in Helen's position who is so overwhelmed by the auditory process is in a kind of, you know, I can't imagine it's a pleasant relationship.
And I think that begins to account for why she is so distraught at the end of it.
What does it leave her with?
I think that, you know, had she felt like she could turn it on or off or that she really was in collaboration with this book, that would have been a more artistic perspective.
She could have made more choices about when she was going to turn it off, you know, or how she was going to let it end.
I think that the authoritarianism of it ends up being sort of an unconscious byproduct of a dysfunctional relationship with an internal voice.
That's interesting.
And so what do you make of her disavowing the book and of Bill continuing reportedly to use it and grow with it spiritually?
Bill continuing to use it as the strongest evidence against it being an MKUltra plot, in my view.
If it was a contrivance, if there were directives from Langley coming down that you should do Chapter 26 now, then he wouldn't have continued to soothe himself and use it as a kind of relief through to the end of his life.
I just don't think that would have happened.
Their two experiences are very extreme because they're at the center of the production.
But their experiences with the book mirror the division and experiences in future readers of the book as well, because some people feel absolutely destroyed by it, and some people feel like it gives them spiritual relief.
And even I would like to say in deference to a dear listener of ours who's named Joseph Baker, who I'm going to have on to talk about this more, there are people who use this book as a form of social gospel to fuel their justice work in there are people who use this book as a form of social And that's possible too.
And so I think there's a range of responses that people can have, but I think that the stress of actually producing the book on Helen had obviously, you know, deleterious effects.
And, you know, people will say, well, you know, it's not easy being a channel of God, right?
The fire's going to burn you or whatever.
whatever.
But I think your vision of, had she been an artist, she would have been able to make more choices.
The book would have been better.
And she probably would have felt like she had done something instead of been used in some way.
Yeah, that's right.
And she would have known how to channel these voices and this feeling.
And she would have understood that it's not ultimately for Well, that it's to make something that's good rather than to document.
And I think that feels very different in the self.
If you're feeling like you're documenting the voice of God versus you're using inspiration to make something good, like you say, you have more agency, you have more control, you can make choices.
You're not underneath drowning in these voices.
You have like a relationship with them.
And yeah, I think that can probably drive somebody mad and make somebody very confused.
I don't see the freedom in it.
And I mean, when I read through passages of motherhood and I think about you flipping those coins, the feeling I get of delight from the strangeness, the unexpectedness, the wonder of what the coins, I don't see the freedom in it.
whatever you're giving to the coins, that seems to me like a more fulfilling spiritual experience than taking dictation from an authoritarian asshole who tells you that if you're sick, it's your own fault, right?
So there's a real paradox there, right?
Like the spiritual text gets kind of forced into this person in a way, non-consensually It's not like she's looking for it.
It's not like she's asking for it to continue either, right?
And it gets sort of put upon her and then she puts it into the world and it becomes this emblem or this symbol of freedom-making for so many people.
And that's so at odds with how it seems to actually happen and often what it actually says.
It's interesting, Harper's editor was doing the fact check, or the fact checker was doing the fact check.
they called up Tam Morgan and asked her about this line that she had said to me that Helen always feared it would create a cult.
And she corrected the fact checker and she said, no, no, no.
Helen feared it would create a cult of personality, a cult of personality around herself.
And we just went with cult because that's what she said originally.
And cult includes cult of personality.
And I thought she was kind of hedging in the end.
What do you think is the difference between a cult and a cult of personality?
I think that Tam may have been incentivized to hedge on cult because of accusations of cultic dynamics that have risen in response to the book.
And as far as I know, the Scutches were very aware of that problem and that accusation.
So I'm not surprised that she might have said one thing and then wanted to walk it back a little bit because...
The cult of personality comment makes it sound like Helen Shookman was actually concerned that people would be fixated on her.
But actually, her behaviors and the way in which she died made it sound to me like she didn't want any attention at all, right?
That she wasn't afraid of a cult of personality arising in relation to her.
She seemed to have some legitimate concern about what the book actually was.
And do you think the people that get something healthy from the book that enhances their lives, that enhances the world around them, versus the kind of people who kind of get sucked in and lose years of their life and for whom it has a very negative effect, have you noticed anything that you can sort of generalize about why it might affect a person one way versus another way?
The generalized answer is if you come to the book in a state of social vulnerability and disconnection, if you come to the book in a gap year, if you come after you've been laid off, if you've come while you're in the middle of a novel writing career and you're horribly depressed, you've lost a family member, this is why your story to me is so interesting is that I feel like it could have gone in that direction were it not for your friend group, right?
And so...
I think that the people who get a lot out of the book and don't suffer from it, they have other things going on, right?
They don't have to defer to the voice of Jesus in the same way that Helen did.
Helen didn't have anything else going on either, it looked like, right?
We're not hearing about a wide network of friends or dinner parties or a lot of socializing.
So, I don't think there are children, right?
Like, that she has?
No, no, no children.
And I think her marriage was probably not that intimate.
Yeah.
I think maybe the rule of thumb would be that the extent to which one becomes very dependent upon the book as a sole sort of arbiter of emotional stability is the extent to which one becomes very vulnerable to it.
And the answer, the antidote to...
Many of its antisocial qualities is to make sure that you have a friend group that you're also going bowling with at the same time that you're wondering whether or not your thoughts are causing your cancer.
That's such a simple prescription for sanity, a friend group.
Yeah, well, I think that, I mean, I come from the cult studies environment, and that's kind of the mantra of recovery, is that restoring secure relationships, especially with people who knew you before you became fascinated or you got derailed by this particular idea, that that's incredibly important.
You know, people who can connect the dots between, you know, who you were before you picked up the book and who you became afterwards and can...
Invite you out to do some of the activities that you used to do together before you picked up the book.
So, yeah, I'm taking it somewhat from that, but there's something specifically isolating and solipsistic about A Course in Miracles that I think the antidote for that is...
And I think that's why the fellow I referenced before, Joseph, is probably really, you know, using it to cook with gas, because as far as, you know, he tells me, you know, he's just doing social justice activism all the time.
Yeah, I remember being very irritated at my boyfriend and the people around me who just dismissed the book.
But I guess in retrospect, there was something kind of good about that.
I wanted to fall into this bliss, you know?
And I was unable to because of the context I was in.
I was unable to for more than a couple of weeks, which I guess is a good thing.
Yeah.
The friend who wrote me a letter while I was in this group, his name was Richard Vaughn, and he was a writer here in Toronto.
I don't know if you knew him.
Yes, yeah.
He was a great guy.
He wrote me this letter that I still have posted up here on my wall, and he basically said, you know, I'm so happy that you found something, but, you know, part of me wonders whether you've become too good for me.
Part of me wonders whether, you know, you won't be interested in talking to me about my troubles or the regular things in our lives, you know?
He did it in such a wonderful way.
I'll post that to the show notes because I actually, after Richard died, I put that up online.
And, yeah, that's the kind of thing that it sounds like you might have had some access to.
Well, yeah, I'd love to read that letter.
That's such a gentle...
Crafty way of making you understand how far you'd gone away from who you'd been.
And it really is a kind of communications miracle, given the fact that most of the time when people hear or think about friends or neighbors or family members who have entered given the fact that most of the time when people hear or think about friends or neighbors or family members who have entered And often confrontation is the chosen method, like what the fuck are you doing with your life?
Like, what are you delusional?
Who are you listening to?
Like, Richard didn't do any of that.
He didn't do any of that.
And I think it's because he probably could understand that my attraction to the group, my attraction to the text came from some sort of place of wounding that he could identify with.
I'm happy that I was able to write this article because I had not really...
I'd not really thought about this aspect of how the artistic spirit can go wrong, like how the feeling of inspiration could kind of take over a person and sort of destroy them.
And in the process, you know, other people could be led astray by its grandiosity, or as you put it, its sadism.
I was surprised that there were no other articles that really in any serious publication had been written about A Course in Miracles.
Looking at the history of it, I didn't understand why.
It just seems like this has been around for decades and it's such an interesting story.
Why has no one written about it?
I don't have an answer.
Why do you think that is?
It's just...
I really don't.
I mean, I think my own contributions to this discourse haven't really, you know, none of them are in Harper's.
And so there's not a lot of visibility for those of us who have taken in this text and developed a critical view of it.
But it is a real mystery because not only has it been around for decades, but it is profoundly influential.
It is the backbone, the kind of the root text of entire publishing industries.
Like there's a new age publishing house called Hay House established by Louise Hay in the 1980s, I believe.
And every one of her authors through the first couple of decades, you know, were course students or most of them were.
And it was a favorite text of hers.
She was an evangelist for it.
And so it has been very influential.
And I think the fact that you've picked it up is great.
I hope that other people research it.
I hope you continue with it if you're still interested.
I think there's more to uncover with regard to its impact, especially its political impact.
But yeah, it's a mystery.
I'm so glad you had me on this podcast to talk about it.
I could ask you a million questions about your experience with it, but I'm really grateful.
Well, thank you, Sheila.
Maybe we'll do this again.
And I'd be happy to switch roles and answer your questions the best I can.
But I'm really glad that you're on the case.
And I'm glad that you had a background, you had a support, you had a network against which you could have this sort of disarming, radiant, but temporary experience.
