9 Aha! Moments that blow Oprah off the Screen
1965: Helen Schucman
A professor of medical psychology at Columbia University from 1958 to 1976, she began having a series of highly “symbolic dreams” with “strange images” in October, 1965, a few weeks after her 56th birthday. A voice told Schucman that, “This is a course in miracles.” What followed was seven years of transcribing that voice, which Schucman said was channeling a new gospel through her. The product was a 1,000-plus-page tomb, A Course in Miracles.
Schucman neither claimed authorship of it, nor publicized the work — and let the copyright go to a non-profit foundation. But a whole generation of self-help authors and psychologists have shamelessly mined the text, which delivers principles of eastern mysticism in Christian terminology, for their own profit. Most notable, it launched the career of Oprah buddy, Marianne Williamson; her first book, A Return to Love, is a regurgitation that sold more than three million copies and prompted the Course’s publisher to clamp down on its “fair use” rules of the material.
IN HER OWN WORDS, Helen Schucman's Aha! Moment:
Psychologist, educator, conservative in theory and atheistic in belief, I was working in a prestigious and highly academic setting. And then something happened that triggered a chain of events I could never have predicted.
Although I had grown more accustomed to the unexpected by that time, I was still very surprised when I wrote, “This is a course in miracles.” That was my introduction to the Voice. It made no sound, but seemed to be giving me a kind of rapid, inner dictation which I took down in a shorthand notebook.
There’s nothing that I would call ordinary audition about this at all. It doesn’t really…It’s a curious thing that will be very difficult to explain. Somebody asked me, “Was it as though your hand was moving?” No. I wrote perfectly voluntarily in response to…I call it a voice, but “a voice” has sounds…or sounds as though it has something to do with hearing. And I didn’t hear anything. I think it’s the sort of hearing that you can’t really describe. It doesn’t have anything to do with ears, or waves hitting a drum or anything on that order. I don’t really know, I think maybe I’m using the wrong word when I say “hear.” I sort of recognized it, it was very rapid, I could even….if I didn’t catch a phrase, I could sort of say, “Would you mind doing that again?”
…this was strictly mental. Otherwise I would consider it hallucinatory activity. I don’t feel it was that.
…It wasn’t my voice. It couldn’t have been because it talked about a whole area with which I am entirely unfamiliar.
…I think “knew” may be a better word than “heard.” I did not know consciously at the beginning of the sentence how it was going to end. And that puts me under a further handicap in terms of ordinary language. Because ordinarily, I think, if you’re going to say a sentence you know what it’s going to be, you sort of get the Gestalt immediately. But I didn’t. And it came very easily, very rapidly, very smoothly. I guess even painlessly, except that it annoyed me to death, but that’s irrelevant. I guess “hear” isn’t the right word. I could stop anytime or pick it up anytime, and I did it in cabs and subways and anywhere, or sort of between telephone calls.
NEXT: J. Krishnamurti, 1922
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- How Oprah fixed my mom
- Why Byron Katie kicks Oprah’s ass
Not knowing is an aha moment, too. I am not sure about Katie. She calls what she does The Work. That descriptive phrase belongs to Gurdjieff if you ask me. He shoulda trademarked it. Life is only real when I am, he said,and I am paraphrasing him a tad.
Let’s face it. People begin as genuinely as they can and if they stay at it long enough, they become genuine fakes, a la Alan Watts. I watch O for the entertainment value. True inner work is not done by buying a bestseller, a pack of Postit notes and a highlighter (that according to a wisecracking friend of mine). Or by watching YouTubes of the masters. Oy.