Why Care what the Original Words were?
It is true that the “inner teacher” or “Holy Spirit” will “lead you into all truth” and any book is just a “teaching aid” and the Holy Spirit can use anything, even the phone book, if we are willing for it to be used. It’s also true that all editions of all versions of the Course which I’ve seen are mostly pretty much the same with no more than a hundred thousand differences or so. So who cares?
Jesus does. He said “every word is meaningful”.
As long as you take accurate notes, every word is meaningful. But I can’t always get through. Whenever possible, I will correct retroactively. Be sure to note all later corrections.
—Shorthand Notes 4:67, Original Dictation T 1 B 19-N1
He was concerned enough to promise to “correct retroactively.”.
This wasn’t just mentioned once.
Contradictions in My words means lack of understanding, or scribal failures, which I make every effort to correct. But they are still not crucial. The Bible has the same problem, I assure you. And it’s still being edited. Consider the power of my Word, in that it has withstood all the attacks of error, and is the Source of Truth. —UrText 1 B 30d.
Here we are being told that the perception of a contradiction in his words, including the words he was giving to Helen at the time, means there is either:
- a lack of understanding of the intended meaning or
- a scribal failure in that the words were not correctly recorded.
An incorrectly recorded word is one explanation for an apparent contradiction or lack of understanding of what was intended. It is more difficult to know what was intended if you don’t know what was said. It is even more difficult to know what was intended if you are told something that wasn’t said, was in fact said. Incorrect words either lack clarity resulting in ambiguity or are flat out wrong, resulting in a clear enough understanding of the words, but a mistaken understanding of the intent if those were not actually his words.
But we are told something else: errors aren’t “crucial”. They aren’t crucial because they will be corrected and that the “power of my Word” can withstand the attacks of error.
There is an interesting shift in meaning here from the expression “my words” meaning the literal “words on the page” to the cosmic “My Word that is the Source of Truth”, in which both the Bible and the Course are referred to as comparable in that both are the “Source of Truth” and also that both suffer from “scribal failures” which require “correction”.
I think it is important to understand the difference here between “words on a page” and “The Word of God”, or Jesus, which is the “Source of Truth”. Any shortcomings either in scribal accuracy or our own understanding in the former will be “corrected” by the latter.
What I take from this is that “getting the words right” in the sense of correcting mistakes in scribing or editing is “important” but not “crucial” in that any failure in the “words on the page” will still be corrected by “The Source of Truth” even if that correction isn’t seen on the page.
He said:
I have made every effort to use words which are almost impossible to distort, but man is very inventive when it comes to twisting symbols around.
—UrText 3 C 9.
This tells us that the “words” weren’t random, weren’t Helen’s paraphrasing of “abstract concepts” given to her, but were precisely the words Jesus wanted her to record, and if she failed, that “retroactive correction” was his plan. Later he was to tell her that this correction required her to ask!
The emphasis on asking in the original dictation is much greater than in any of the later versions. The word “ask” by itself is used 260 times in the Shorthand Notes, but only 200 times in the Urtext, 176 in the HLC and 175 in the FIP abridgement.
I think each of these points is essential to understand what Jesus had to say about the “words on the page” and their relative importance. I think it is useful to remember that any book is at most a “teaching device” or a signpost “pointing us to the truth”. It is not “the truth itself”. But a signpost that points us in the wrong direction, or is missing, is not helpful when compared to one that is, even though its errors or omissions are perhaps not “crucial”. In the Manual for Teachers Jesus says something quite instructive:
Words can be helpful, particularly for the beginner, in helping concentration and facilitating the exclusion or at least the control of extraneous thoughts. Let us not forget, however, that words are but symbols of symbols. They are thus twice removed from reality.
—UrText M 22 A 1.
So words help us focus or concentrate in that they facilitate the exclusion of extraneous thoughts. The “right words” will result in useful thoughts while the wrong ones are just more “extraneous thoughts”. Like any extraneous thought, it’s not crucial — just a delay.
The issue here then is not that “wrong words” or “scribal errors” are “bad” in that they can block someone’s salvation — not at all. It is more that the “right words” are more helpful than the wrong ones and as such would rationally be preferred over the wrong ones if that choice was freely available.
Who, given a choice in the purchase of any book by any author, would prefer a badly edited abridgement with many thousands of mistakes over an accurate copy with few mistakes? What is better about having more errors?
The basic thrust of my work and the basic reason for the Original Dictation Project is to do at least as much “correcting” of a myriad of scribal errors as is possible from the physical evidence available to us. Despite the enormous efforts of the late Ken Wapnick and others to prevent access to the physical evidence and to obstruct Jesus’s efforts to correct scribal errors retroactively, the means has been made available. It has been available because we asked and we are willing. Precisely as Jesus told us through Helen, if you ask you will receive and he is wanting the errors to be corrected and he will help!