The Original Dictation Project

As with any “Holy Book” or “Scripture”, before we can hope to fully understand what it means we have to at least know what it says.

Overview

Having come down to us in several different versions with vastly different wording, it is necessary, in order to know what it says, to consider all of the variant readings for any passage in A Course in Miracles. Ultimately, the goal is to identify every variant reading or difference from one version to the next, correct those changes which were mistakes and preserve those changes which were genuine corrections.

This project was conceived to make it reasonably easy for anyone to at least compare any given passage by systematically organizing more than six thousand manuscript pages in a fully cross-referenced, machine searchable database complete with reference and research tools such as concordances.

This website is about making the results of the ongoing project maximally available to everyone interested.

As will become apparent, a vast amount of work has already gone into this project and a vast amount remains yet to be done. The continuing support for this project by many people makes it possible.

Please donate generously as you feel guided.

Introduction

The Original Dictation Project was conceived in the year 2000 to make evaluation of the tens of thousands of variant readings between all known scribal versions possible. In order to do that three things had to be achieved:

1. Prepare accurate e-texts of each of the original manuscripts of all historical scribal versions
2. Compare all versions to generate a Catalogue of Variant Readings
3. Evaluate all variant readings to establish the most authentic or “original” wording intended by the Author for each passage.

Each phase has three distinct components:

1. Basic transcription and proofreading of all four versions
2. Publication of initial results: typesetting, printing, marketing, website developemnt
3. Development of research tools such as Concordances to facilitate further research

As results that might be useful to a larger public are available, such as accurate copies of particular scribal versions, usable concordances, and even rough transcripts of previously unavailable material and so forth, these are published in both e-text and print forms as resources for their publication become available.

Currently e-text and facsimile copies of at least large portions of all four known scribal versions are available. See the reading room for copies suitable for ease of online reading and the bookstore for print copies available for purchase.

At this point in time Phase One is nearing completion in that we have or are close to having completely proofed and accurate e-text copies of all four known historical scribal versions. This phase has resulted in several publications (see the reading room and bookstore).

Phase Two involves the generation of a Catalogue of Variant Readings which will enable anyone to instantly identify all editing changes ever made to any passage in the Course.

Phase Three involves the evaluation of variants to determine the most authentic variant in each case of a variant. The result of this phase will be a new Critical Edition of A Course in Miracles in which each passage that was ever changed is rendered in the form deemed to be the most authentic and original based on the best assessment that can be made with the tools of textual scholarship.

Background

Why are there so many different versions and so many uncertain readings?

In the beginning, Helen Schucman had an “experience” in which she “heard the Voice of Jesus”. Helen Schucman is not the only person to have had this kind of experience, but is one of few to diligently record, with good accuracy, thousands of pages of dictation from Jesus at his behest.

Initially taken down by hand, the handwritten pages were transcribed into type and repeatedly retyped with some editing. Helen wrote of her editing role thus:

I assumed the attitude of an editor whose role is to consider only form and disregard content as much as possible … Bill was adamant in opposing any changes at all, except for deleting the too personal early references and correcting actual typing errors. I wanted to change just about everything, but I knew that Bill was right. Any changes I made were always wrong in the long run, and had to be put back. [The material] had a way of knowing what it was doing, and was much better left exactly as it was.

Because we have finally been able to secure the original handwritten notes and three later revised typed copies, we can see that almost everything that was changed either stayed changed or was changed again, and that almost nothing was ever “put back” or restored to an earlier form. Some claim that if changes were made and then subsequently restored, that must have happened in documents which are not presently available to us. There is no evidence in available scribal documents to support this claim.

That Helen should concede that “any changes I made were always wrong in the long run” is itself quite fascinating. That Bill opposed making any changes at all beyond the omission of personal material that he had in fact been instructed by Jesus to omit, is equally interesting. It strongly suggests that aside from omissions of “personal” material, any changes beyond “correcting actual typing errors” were made by Helen, and later by Helen and Ken in the FIP version.

Although Helen was explicitly told that the editing was Bill’s responsibility, and there is no record of that instruction ever having been changed, the indications all suggest that the instruction was later disregarded, that Helen did want to “change just about everything” and in tens of thousands of cases, did so.

Having spent the better part of ten years examining thousands of changes Helen made, I mostly agree with her, they were almost always “wrong”. But some changes really were genuine corrections of earlier errors.

A vast number of the “changes” from one version to the next are in fact almost certainly copying mistakes which were simply not noticed during the editing and retyping because they never did adequate proofreading.

So what is Helen really saying? It sounds like she is saying that “any changes” she made were later “put back”. But we find no evidence whatsoever to support that assertion. We know she made tens of thousands of changes ranging in significance from trivial to very important. In the four scribal versions available to us we can track tens of thousands of changes and in only a handful of cases, mostly involving punctuation, was anything ever restored to an earlier form in Helen’s lifetime. In the FIP Second Edition a few inadvertent dropouts were in fact restored, but that happened ten years after Helen had passed on, so rather obviously she wasn’t referring to that event and that event did not restore anything more than a small proportion of the inadvertent copying mistakes.

Everyone, or almost everyone, wants to read the “original edition” of almost any book, without “wrong” editing decisions and without copying mistakes. In the case of ACIM, no one of the four available “scribal versions” is really “it”. Each one has material not found in any other and each is missing material found in at least one other. Each one also contains what are very likely genuine corrections of earlier genuine errors.

What then is the genuine, authentic, “original dictation” of A Course in Miracles?

How can we Establish the “Original Dictation”?

Methodology

I approached the problem following the model of Biblical scholarship. The “problem” there is a bit different but similar. The Bible was copied by hand for thousands of years before the invention of the printing press and in every copy there were copying mistakes. In addition there was an undetermined amount of intentional editing. Textual scholars, rather like crime scene investigators, can generally figure out from the surviving physical evidence at least what the evidence says about which of the thousands of variant readings arising from editing and copying mistakes is the closest to the “original” author’s original intent.

The problem with the Course is much more modest, we have only four different versions rather than thousands, but as with the Bible we’ve got copying mistakes. Now, sometimes, even in Biblical manuscripts, a later manuscript is actually more accurate than an earlier one because it is a faithful copy of a lost but even earlier one. And sometimes, in the Course, a later change is a genuine dictated correction of an earlier form.

And since we don’t have all of the Scribal manuscripts, a later version could be a copy of an earlier and more reliable source which we don’t have access to.

Therefore, rather like Biblical scholarship has done, it is necessary to look at each and every variant reading with the idea of trying to ascertain which is the more authentic.

Given the huge number of words in any one version, the fact that we have four, and the fact that there are tens of thousands of variants between them, simply identifying every variant reading is a huge clerical task. Done manually it could employ armies of clerks for years. However, with computers, much of that work can be done by machines rather quickly. But for a computer to “compare” two versions, we have to give the computer precisely accurate copies of each. The Scribal manuscripts are on paper, they aren’t word processor files.

Phase I: Accurate transcripts of all Scribal Manuscripts

The first task then has been to produce precisely accurate transcripts of each typed and handwritten page produced by the Scribes such that we can get the computer to tell us where all the changes really are. That task, which is mostly the work of transcription and proofreading, is now largely completed. We have machine readable copies of most of the Scribal Manuscripts which are of good accuracy and what is left to be done is rather little.

Ultimately, of course, the goal is to identify every variant reading or difference from one version to the next, correct those changes which were mistakes and of course preserve those changes which were genuine corrections.

Phase II: A Catalogue of Variant Readings

The next task is the production of a Catalogue of Variant Readings. Because we are dealing with a rather large amount of material, this is a rather huge undertaking.

Phase III: An Eclectic Critical Edition

In the meantime…

It may well take years for either to be complete. In the meantime there are several more limited goals which can be achieved quite quickly. Those include the publication of accurate and reliable copies of each of the historical scribal versions and with the two earliest, the Notes and the Urtext, because the differences are rather few, it is fairly easy to simply combine the two and produce an eclectic version of the “original dictation”. This will not, of course, incorporate or evaluate later editing. As noted, most of that later editing was described by Helen herself as “always wrong” and very little is likely ever to be established as “genuine corrections”.

The Critical Edition

The Critical Edition is the long range goal.

In the case of A Course in Miracles the historical record consists of four rather different historical scribal versions. Each contains some material not present in any other and each contains some genuine corrections of earlier scribal errors. Each also contains a myriad of copying mistakes which crept in due to frequent retyping and inadequate proofreading.

The goal of the Critical Edition is quite simply to preserve all original authentic dictation, include all genuine corrections of genuine errors, and restore all genuine copying mistakes to the original correct form.

In the vast majority of cases it is very obvious what is a genuine correction and what is a genuine mistake. Where it is not obvious, or where there is more than one variant reading with a plausible case for authenticity, every effort must be made to establish which is the more authentic.

As noted elsewhere, the basic methodology involves the examination of every editing change introduced by the Scribes in each of the historical scribal versions to which we have access. To do that we have to find all those variants and the means chosen has been to begin with a scrupulously accurate copy of each, generate comparisons between them, assemble a Catalogue of Variant Readings from that and then evaluate the various readings.