Post by Stephen Calderother words, if Renard is a diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic, perhaps his
readers should be advised of that fact.
He's not, as you would know if you'd read it.
Gary doesn't assert that he has any special spiritual qualities; in real
life, as in the book, he's a smart ass but doesn't take credit for being
other than a messenger. You've set up him as a self-proclaimed prophet so
you can shoot him down. He's not saying he's that. You're tilting at
windmills.
Well actually Stephen, in the material you have quoted here for us, Gary's
visitors assert that unlike most people (or was it unlike almost all
people?) Gary was ready and able to hear. Apparently if the tapes had been
played to you and I we'd not have heard anything ... This is a claim to
Gary's specialness coming from the "Ascended Masters" who of course have a
pretty strong claim to specialness from the Ego viewpoint. Now this is
highly suspicious ... and in marked contrast to the way Jesus, in ACIM,
speaks to Helen and Bill of their "specialness."
So here is a claim to specialness being made either by Gary through his
fictional characters or by genuine ascended masters for whom Gary is making
rather remarkable and totally unique claims. While many "Ascended Masters"
have incarnated on Earth from time to time, I know of no other case where a
claim was made that Ascended Masters from "the future" (a questionable
concept for any genuine ascended master at best) travelled back in time to
show up in their own past to re-arrange it by spending eight years talking
to one man's tape recorder, one man who then destroyed the tapes after
writing a book which includes much less than a full transcript of eight
years of conversation.
Ya right.
If there really were such time travellers from the future, ascended masters
or not, Eight Years worth of tapes from them would be of enormous interest
and value. Gary saw fit to destroy the tapes and give us instead his
massively abridged summary account of what he found important. And of
course there is no way to check how accurate his account is. So if he's
telling the truth, that there really were visitors from the future and he
really taped them for 8 years and then destroyed the tapes, he is guilty of
crimes against humanity as bad if not worse than the burning of the Library
at Alexandria. Clearly, if he is telling the truth, he is a man who is a
long way from having demonstrated himself to be trustworthy when in
possession of precious, irreplaceable, unique information!
Again, I have no way of proving whether he is or isn't telling the truth but
the overall plausibility of the theory that he wrote a science fiction book,
did a pretty good job, drew enough from ACIM to make it "inspirational" and
then found that some of his readers wanted to believe it was all "fact" so
he went along with that for the bucks is much higher than the plausibility
that he had supernatural visitors, taped them, and then destroyed the tapes.
It would not be a very different story from that of his Idol, Ken Wapnick,
who has written some very inspirational, if fanciful commentary on the
Course (liberally quoted by Renard) and then went on to lie extensively in
the name of money.
The whole thing has quite a stench of fraud and hoaxery about it Stephen ...
which is not to say that it is necessarily a fraud and a hoax ... but rather
to say that it is all designed for the less critical and more credulous
among us ... Once you start to test it, it falls on its face.
Either Renard the fiction writer is lying, or Renard the Messenger (which is
the definition of the word "Prophet" by the way) is presenting material
which claims divine authority, contradicts ACIM on some key points, and thus
claims the authority to correct and update ACIM. That is the claim Gary is
making when he says it's non-fiction. He claims for the words he set to
paper, not the authority of his imagination (however inspired) but the
authority of not one, but two Ascended Masters ... "from the future" yet!
That is quite a claim to make and that is the claim he is making for his
"message" (or
"prophecy").
Thus he is a "self-proclaimed Prophet" of the divine ... that is precisely
what his claim is. No more but certainly no less. This is not the usual
claim of science fiction writers!
As St. Paul taught, every prophecy should be tested because he well knew
that the self-deceived as well as the charlatans and the frauds could
present falsehood as truth in the guise of prophecy.
We must at least TEST such claims to prophecy before accepting them as
authentic.
You, Stephen, seem to have failed to grasp that you are dealing with a claim
to Prophetic (messenger/message from the divine) whose implications are
quite enormous, if true, and totally scandalous, if false.
John is not tilting at any windmills nor making any straw-man arguments
here. He's going to the heart of the matter which most seem to have missed.
If Gary is telling the truth (and I'm on 99% sure he's not) then the
implications of his account are staggering. If he's not telling the truth,
as seems quite obvious at even a superficial glance, then we have nothing
new under the sun. The history of religion is fraught with charlatans and
frauds and hallucinations. Just on the odds, that is by far the mostly
likely explanation.
If Ascended Masters from the future really were to travel back in time to
change the course of history, which is the claim Gary is making, we'd expect
them to have something rather profound to say to us, as Jesus did in his
lifetime, as all the recognized Prophets did in theirs, and as Jesus did in
ACIM. Of all the commentary on "Disappearance" I've seen ... nothing
remotely profound has surfaced, and indeed nothing that Gary or you or I
could not have dreamed up on our own over the past eight years. What a
contrast to ACIM where the content was clearly far and away beyond anything
Bill or Helen could have dreamed up on their own!
C'mon Stephen! ... recognize that the History of Religion is fraught with
scams and frauds and charlatans and hoaxes, that you will inevitably run
into quite a few, and that the odds are high that this is just one more.
With that knowledge in mind evaluate the material critically. If there is
no sign of fraud or even honest self-deception and if there is something in
the content of supreme value and merit THEN and ONLY then could the material
be a serious candidate for being accepted as what it claims to be and what
Gary claims for it.
I think John is mistaken in looking for a criminal record or history of
mental illness. Neither, in my view, would be meaningful for evaluating
Gary's claims for his work as most "genuine" Prophets spent quite a bit of
time in jail and probably would have been certified as insane by
contemporary mental health professionals (recall how worried Helen was that
she was going crazy when the dictation began).
If we're at all aware of what's going on in the "field of religion" since
recorded history began, we know that a lot of totally ridiculous ideas arise
and are embraced, sometimes by large numbers, sometimes by small. Here in
Quebec we've had the "Solar Temple" cult with its mass suicides. The USA
has had Jim Jones and then the Branch Davidian heavy artillery collectors
(who should have stockpiled more anti-tank weapons! :)). Jesus warns us in
the New Testament of "false prophets" who can be very persuasive and might
even deceive "the elect." There are, and are going to be, a lot of false
prophets, some of whom due to severe denial and split minds will not be
deliberately or consciously or intentionally deceiving anyone. No liar is
worse than the self-deceived!
Didn't Jesus tell us to be "gentle as lambs and wary as serpents" about such
claims? Wary because most of them are going to be false! How can we tell
which is which? Well first, I suggest, look for the obvious signs of
self-interest, financial gain and profit, and "specialness." These are all
signs of "ego-religion" which is to say they are indicators of the
self-deceived or the outright charlatan.
As I understand it, Gary was quite upfront about seeking to make a lot of
money with his book and invest in Hawaiian real estate and it required his
visitors from the future to tell him to go get published with Pat. As I've
pointed out, if they really were visitors from the future they'd not have
had to tell him because they'd have known what he would do. (what he had
already done, from their deterministic future) That they had to tell him
almost proves that they weren't visitors from the future as Gary presents
"the future."
Here's why: ACIM often mentions the future of the human race, that the
remedy for the separation may take millions of years for instance, and that
it depends on the current "celestial speedup." Jesus tells us in the NT
that "only the Father" (and not Jesus) knows the precise date and time for
anything to come. So Jesus, in ACIM and in the NT, is presenting an idea of
the "future" as highly "conditional" on what we do, and not as something
that is "fixed" in any way, except for the ultimate outcome of universal
salvation. So much for Calvinist pre-destination. Yet any visitor from the
future who has anything to say about what "will happen" is clearly either
bullshitting us or is coming from a Calvinistic "determined future." And is
therefore contradicting Jesus. Yet Gary's visitors from the future not only
have things to say about what "will happen" (deterministic) but meddle in
their own past ... by visiting Gary ... so as to CHANGE the (our) future
(which is their past)! All of which would be totally unethical within a
deterministic perspective. If it is fixed you can't change it and if you
change it ... as Gary's visitors did just by visiting ... then it's not
deterministic and nothing about the "future" they knew necessarily relates
to the new future they create by altering their own past.
Now if we take Jesus in ACIM and the New Testament as "likely to be correct"
... that the future is conditional ... then it follows we'll get no visitors
from the future, and aside from Gary's Book, no spiritual or metaphysical
tome has ever dealt with visitors from the future. Visitors from eternity
yes, visitors with "conditional prophecies" about "the future" yes ... as in
"if you don't change your ways, you're going to regret it" ... but always
with that conditionality. The future is not deterministic.
Gary presents a completely unique metaphysics which completely contradicts
not only ACIM, but just about every other spiritual tradition, just by
presenting visitors from the future who apparently know what will happen,
not conditionally, but certainly, because our future is their past. This
is, in Jesus' thought, a complete impossibility.
So if Gary is right and these visitors from the future really did show up
(which as you can see I doubt) then we have to conclude that ACIM is wrong
and should be junked. They don't say that in Gary's book, they say quite
the opposite and in doing that they are completely self-contradictory. I
think Gary is just not a very good liar and didn't see the total
contradiction and logical impossibility of his "future visitors" hypothesis.
I think he watched one too many episodes of Star Trek ... and was trying to
write a screen play for one!
So really "the story" here about these visitors from the future and the
destroyed tapes and all ... just doesn't hold water ... it's not plausible.
It's more than "highly improbable." It's simply not credible as soon as you
look closely at it, on any number of counts, and I've not even looked
closely at it yet! I'm just going on what has been quoted from it by
others.
So, having noted just a handful of the numerous problems with even
entertaining the notion that the work is anything other than science
fiction, we must ask the more important question: "Is there any good reason
to accept Gary's account as factual?" There are many reasons to reject it,
but even more important is the question as to what profundity and great
insights it ADDS to our understanding. What benefits accrue to the one who
accepts this material at face value as legit?
So far no one has said anything about that, but that would be the most
significant indicator I think.
All the best,
Doug